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HOW  TO  GET  THE  BEST 
OUT  OF  BOOKS 


RICHARD     LeGALLIENNE 


How  to  get  the  Best 
Out  of  Books 


By 
Richard  Le  Gallienne 


New  York 

The  Baker  and  Taylor  Company 

33-37  E.  Seventeenth  St. 

Union  Square  North 


*tttttttttrmtrtttTttttttttttttTwtt"j 


Copyright,  1904,  by  The  Baker   &  Taylor  Co. 
Published,  March,  1904 


The  Plimpton   Press,  Nonvood,  Mass. 


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To   Temple    Scott 

A  peppercorn  acknowledgment   of  an  old  and 
true  friendship. 

Liverpool,  1887— New  York,  1904. 


LIBRARY 


Of  the  following  papers  "  What  we  Look  for 
Nowadays  in  Books  has  not  been  printed  before. 
The  others  have  all  appeared  in  SUCCESS,  to 
the  editor  of  which  magazine,  Dr.  0.  S.  Harden, 
I  am  indebted  for  his  kind  permission  to  reprint ; 
and  I  desire  especially  to  express  my  indebtedness  to 
my  friend  Mr.  Robert  Mackay,  the  associate  editor, 
for  the  suggestions  out  of  which  all  the  papers  sprang. 

R.  Le  G. 


Contents 


How  to  get  the  Best  out  of  Books    ...        1 
What  we  Look  for  Nowadays  in  Books     .     21 

What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 53 

What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read      .      .     81 

How  to  Form  a  Library 105 

The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day    .     .139 


HOW  TO  GET  THE  BEST 
OUT  OF  BOOKS 


What  is  a  great  love  of  books  ? 

It  is  something  like  a  personal  in- 
troduction to  the  great  and  good  of  all 
times. 

— John  Brigham. 

When  all  that  is  worldly  turns  to 
dross  around  us,  books  only  retain 
their  steady  value. 

— Washington  Irving. 


Introduction 

THESE  papers  were  written  with  an  in- 
tention, and  from  a  point  of  view,  which 
will,  I  fear,  seem  humble  enough  to  professed 
literary  persons;  and  by  such  will  need  to  be 
approached,  if  approached  at  all,  with  a  certain 
condescension  —  that  condescension  which,  to 
academic  ways  of  thinking,  is  the  beginning  of 
criticism. 

All  arts  and  even  sciences  are  in  a  measure 
aristocracies,  but  they  are  aristocracies  of  nature 
— they  are  not  castes,  which  are  merely  aris- 
tocracies of  convention  with  a  thin  thread  of 
natural  ancestry;  and,  alas!  they  seldom  pass 
from  father  to  son.  It  is,  however,  the  natural 
aim — human  nature  being  naturally  financial 
— of  those  professional  and  academic  bodies 
and  persons  who  deal  with  the  non-hereditary 
arts  and  sciences  to  persuade  the  superstitious 


Introduction 

natural  man  that  they  alone  are  the  deposi- 
taries of  the  gifts  of  remote  great -great-cousins 
of  genius,  or  the  closely-cupboarded  lore  of 
family  ties;  that  in  fact  the  arts  and  sciences 
are  castes  as  well. 

And  the  natural  man  believes  them  on  his 
knees  !  For  practical  purposes  of  definition 
nowadays,  the  natural  man  may  be  defined  as 
the  business  man.  Either  the  business  man 
superstitiously  accepts  the  authority,  on  literary 
matters,  of  the  bloodless  professor,  or  with  ig- 
norant contempt  denies  the  importance  of  lit- 
erature altogether. 

The  aim  of  these  simple  pages  has  been  to 
convince  him  that  literature  is  a  living  thing, 
and  that  the  relation  of  books  to  life  is  close 
and  vital — and  by  no  means  merely  orna- 
mental. Owing  to  the  proprietorial  manner 
of  the  academies,  he  has  come  to  look  upon 
books — and  incidentally  upon  the  writers  of 
them — as  so  much  fancy-work,  and,  dare  I 
say,  so  many  curates  ! — either  as  such,  or  as 
Sinaitic  presences,  and  hierophants,  of  mys- 
terious and  unpractical  knowledge.     It  is  only 


Introduction 

now  and  again,  aroused  by  some  voice  of  pierc- 
ing reality,  of  primeval  freshness,  some  voice 
irresistibly  calling  from  the  heart,  or  with  vivid 
simplicity  lighting  up  some  daily  duty  or  some 
hidden  human  dream,  that  he  realizes  that 
books  too  are  realities  and  that  the  writers  of 
books  also  are  helping  to  build  the  world. 


HOWTO  GETTHE  BEST 
OUT  OF  BOOKS 


ONE  is  sometimes  asked  by  young  peo- 
ple panting  after  the  water-brooks  of 
knowledge:  "How  shall  I  get  the  best 
out  of  books  ? "  Here,  indeed,  is  one  of  those 
questions  which  can  only  be  answered  in  gen- 
eral terms,  with  possible  illustrations  from 
one's  own  personal  experience.  Misgivings, 
too,  as  to  one's  fitness  to  answer  it  may  well 
arise,  as  wistfully  looking  round  one's  own  book- 
shelves, one  asks  oneself:  "Have  I  myself  got 
the  best  out  of  this  wonderful  world  of  books  ?  " 
It  is  almost  like  asking  oneself:  "Have  I  got 
the  best  out  of  life  ?  " 

As  we  make  the  survey,  it  will  surely  happen 
that  our  eyes  fall  on  many  writers  whom  the 

[1] 


Hoiv  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Boohs 

stress  of  life,  or  spiritual  indolence,  has  pre- 
vented us  from  using  as  all  the  while  they  have 
been  eager  to  be  used;  friends  we  might  have 
made  yet  have  never  made,  neglected  coun- 
sellors we  would  so  often  have  done  well  to  con- 
sult, guides  that  could  have  saved  us  many 
a  wrong  turning  in  the  difficult  way.  There, 
in  unvisited  corners  of  our  shelves,  what  neg- 
lected fountains  of  refreshment,  gardens  in 
which  we  have  never  walked,  hills  we  have 
never  climbed! 

"  Well,"  we  say  with  a  sigh,  "  a  man  cannot 
read  everything;  it  is  life  that  has  interrupted 
our  studies,  and  probably  the  fact  is  that  we 
have  accumulated  more  books  than  we  really 
need."  The  young  reader's  appetite  is  largely 
in  his  eyes,  and  it  is  very  natural  for  one  who  is 
born  with  a  taste  for  books  to  gather  them 
about   him    at    first   indiscriminately,    on   the 


Hoio  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

hearsay  recommendation  of  fame,  before  he 
really  knows  what  his  own  individual  tastes  are, 
or  are  going  to  be,  and,  in  that  wistful  survey 
I  have  imagined,  our  eyes  will  fall,  too,  with 
some  amusement,  on  not  a  few  volumes  to 
which  we  never  have  had  any  really  personal 
relation,  and  which,  whatever  their  distinction 
or  their  value  for  others,  were  never  meant  for 
us.  The  way  to  do  with  such  books  is  to  hand 
them  over  to  some  one  who  has  a  use  for  them. 
On  our  shelves  they  are  like  so  much  good 
thrown  away,  invitations  to  entertainments 
for  which  we  have  no  taste.  In  all  vital  libra- 
ries, such  a  process  of  progressive  refection  is 
continually  going  on,  and  to  realize  what  we 
do  not  want  in  books,  or  cannot  use,  must,  ob- 
viously, be  a  first  principle  in  our  getting  the 
best  out  of  them. 

Yes,  we  read  too  many  books,  and  too  many 

[3] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

that,  as  they  do  not  really  interest  us,  bring  us 
neither  benefit  nor  diversion.  Even  from  the 
point  of  view  of  reading  for  pleasure,  we  man- 
age our  reading  badly-  We  listlessly  allow 
ourselves  to  be  bullied  by  publishers'  adver- 
tisements into  reading  the  latest  fatuity  in  fic- 
tion, without,  in  one  case  out  of  twenty,  finding 
any  of  that  pleasure  we  are  ostensibly  seeking. 
Instead,  indeed,  we  are  bored  and  enervated, 
where  we  might  have  been  refreshed,  either  by 
romance  or  laughter.  Such  reading  resembles 
the  idle  absorption  of  innocuous  but  uninter- 
esting beverages,  which  cheer  as  little  as  they 
inebriate,  and  yet  at  the  same  time  make  friv- 
olous demands  on  the  digestive  functions.  No 
one  but  a  publisher  could  call  such  reading 
"light."  Actually  it  is  weariness  of  the  flesh 
and  heaviness  of  the  spirit. 

If,  therefore,  onr  idea  of  the  best  in  books  is 

[4] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

the  recreation  they  can  so  well  bring,  if  we  go 
to  books  as  to  a  playground  to  forget  our  cares, 
and  to  blow  off  the  cobwebs  of  business,  let  us 
make  sure  that  we  find  what  we  seek.  It  is 
there  sure  enough.  The  playgrounds  of  liter- 
ature are  indeed  wide,  and  alive  with  bracing 
excitement,  nor  is  there  any  limit  to  the  variety 
of  the  games.  But  let  us  be  sure,  when  we  set 
out  to  be  amused,  that  we  are  really  amused, 
that  our  humourists  do  really  make  us  laugh, 
and  that  our  story-tellers  have  stories  to  tell 
and  know  how  to  tell  them.  Beware  of  imita- 
tions, and,  when  in  doubt,  try  Shakespeare, 
and  Dumas,  —  even  Ouida.  As  a  rule,  avoid 
the  "spring  lists,"  or  "summer  reading." 
"Summer  reading"  is  usually  very  hot  work. 
Hackneyed  as  it  is,  there  is  no  better  general 
advice  on  reading  than  Shakespeare's  — 
No  profit  is  where  is  no  pleasure  taken, 
[5] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

In  brief,  sir,  study  what  you  most  affect. 
Not  only  in  regard  to  books  whose  purpose, 
frankly,  is  recreation,  but  also  in  regard  to  the 
graver  uses  of  books,  this  counsel  no  less  holds. 
No  reading  does  us  any  good  that  is  not  a  pleas- 
ure to  us.  Her  paths  are  paths  of  pleasantness. 
Yet,  of  course,  this  does  not  mean  that  all  prof- 
itable reading  is  easy  reading.  Some  of  the 
books  that  give  us  the  finest  pleasure  need  the 
closest  application  for  their  enjoyment.  There 
is  always  a  certain  spiritual  and  mental  effort 
necessary  to  be  made  before  we  tackle  the 
great  books.  One  might  compare  it  to  the 
effort  of  getting  up  to  see  the  sun  rise.  It  is  no 
little  of  a  tug  to  leave  one's  warm  bed,  —  but 
once  we  are  out  in  the  crystalline  morning  air, 
wasn't  it  worth  it  ?  Perhaps  our  finest  pleasure 
always  demand  some  such  austerity  of  prepa- 
ration.    That  is  the  secret  of  the  truest  epicu- 

[6] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

reanism.  Books  like  Dante's  "Divine  Com- 
edy," or  Plato's  dialogues,  will  not  give  them- 
selves to  a  lounging  reader.  They  demand  a 
braced,  attentive  spirit.  But  when  the  first 
effort  has  been  made,  how  exhilarating  are  the 
altitudes  in  which  we  find  ourselves,  what  a 
glow  of  pure  joy  is  the  reward  which  we  are 
almost  sure  to  win  by  our  mental  mountain- 
eering. 

But  such  books  are  not  for  moments  when 
we  are  unwilling  or  unable  to  make  that  neces- 
sary effort.  We  cannot  always  be  in  the  mood 
for  the  great  books,  and  often  we  are  too  tired 
physically,  or  too  low  down  on  the  depressed 
levels  of  daily  life,  even  to  lift  our  eyes  toward 
the  hills.  To  attempt  the  great  books,  —  or 
any  books  at  all,  —  in  such  moods  and  mo- 
ments, is  a  mistake.  We  may  thus  contract 
a    prejudice    against    some    writer    who,    ap- 

m 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Boohs 

proached  in  more  fortunate  moments,  would 
prove  the  very  man  we  were  looking  for. 

To  know  when  to  read  is  hardly  less  impor- 
tant than  to  know  what  to  read.  Of  course, 
every  one  must  decide  the  matter  for  himself; 
but  one  general  counsel  may  be  ventured: 
Read  only  what  you  want  to  read,  and  only 
when  you  want  to  read  it. 

Some  readers  find  the  early  morning,  when 
they  have  all  the  world  to  themselves,  their 
best  time  for  reading,  and,  if  you  are  a  good 
sleeper,  and  do  not  find  early  rising  more 
wearying  than  refreshing,  there  is  certainly 
no  other  time  of  the  day  when  the  mind  is  so 
eagerly  receptive,  has  so  keen  an  edge  of  ap- 
petite, and  absorbs  a  book  in  so  fine  an  intoxi- 
cation. For  your  true  book-lover  there  is  no 
other  exhilaration  so  exquisite  as  that  with 
which  one  reads  an  inspiring  book  in  the  solemn 

[8] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

freshness  of  early  morning.  One's  nerves 
seem  peculiarly  strung  for  exquisite  impres- 
sions in  the  first  dewy  hours  of  the  day,  there 
is  a  virginal  sensitiveness  and  purity  about  all 
our  senses,  and  the  mere  delight  of  the  eye 
in  the  printed  page  is  keener  than  at  any 
other  time.  "The  Muses  love  the  morning, 
and  that  is  a  fit  time  for  study,"  said  Erasmus 
to  his  friend  Christianus  of  Lubeck;  and,  cer- 
tainly, if  early  rising  agrees  with  one,  there  is 
no  better  time  for  getting  the  very  best  out  of 
a  book.  Moreover,  morning  reading  has  a 
way  of  casting  a  spell  of  peace  over  the  whole 
day.  It  has  a  sweet,  solemnizing  effect  on  our 
thoughts,  —  a  sort  of  mental  matins,  —  and 
through  the  day's  business  it  accompanies  us 
as  with  hidden  music. 

There  are  other  readers  who  prefer  to  do 
their  reading  at  night,   and  I  presume  that 

[9] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

most  readers  of  this  paper  are  so  circum- 
stanced as  to  have  no  time  to  spare  for 
reading  during  the  day.  Personally,  I  think 
that  one  of  the  best  places  to  read  is  in  bed. 
Paradoxical  as  it  may  sound,  one  is  not  so  apt 
to  fall  asleep  over  his  book  in  bed  as  in  the 
postprandial  armchair.  While  one's  body  rests 
itself,  one's  mind  remains  alert,  and,  when  the 
time  for  sleep  comes  at  last,  it  passes  into  un- 
consciousness, tranquilized  and  sweetened  with 
thought  and  pleasantly  weary  with  healthy  ex- 
ercise. One  awakens,  too,  next  morning, 
with,  so  to  say,  a  very  pleasant  taste  of  medita- 
tion in  the  mouth.  Erasmus,  again,  has  a 
counsel  for  the  bedtime  reader,  expressed  with 
much  felicity.  "A  little  before  you  sleep," 
he  says,  "  read  something  that  is  exquisite,  and 
worth  remembering;  and  contemplate  upon  it 
till  you  fall  asleep;  and,  when  you  awake  in  the 

[10] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

morning,  call  yourself  to  an  account  for  it." 
In  an  old  Atlantic  Monthly,  from  which,  if 
I  remember  aright,  he  never  rescued  it,  Oliver 
Wendell  Holmes  has  a  delightful  paper  on  the 
delights  of  reading  in  bed,  entitled  "Pillow- 
Smoothing  Authors." 

Then,  though  I  suppose  we  shall  have  the 
oculists  against  us,  the  cars  are  good  places  to 
read  in,  —  if  you  have  the  power  of  detach- 
ment, and  are  able  to  switch  off  your  ears  from 
other  people's  conversation.  It  is  a  good  plan 
to  have  a  book  with  you  in  all  places  and  at  all 
times.  Most  likely  you  will  carry  it  many  a 
day  and  never  give  it  a  single  look,  but,  even 
so,  a  book  in  the  hand  is  always  a  companion- 
able reminder  of  that  happier  world  of  fancy, 
which,  alas !  most  of  us  can  only  visit  by  playing 
truant  from   the   real   world.     As   some   men 

wear  boutonnieres,  so  a  reader  carries  a  book, 

[11] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

and  sometimes,  when  be  is  feeling  the  need  of 
beauty,  or  the  solace  of  a  friend,  he  opens  it, 
and  finds  both.  Probably  he  will  count  among 
the  most  fruitful  moments  of  his  reading  the 
snatched  glimpses  of  beauty  and  wisdom  he 
has  caught  in  the  morning  car.  The  covers 
of  his  book  have  often  proved  like  some  secret 
door,  through  which,  surreptitiously  opened, 
he  has  looked  for  a  moment  into  his  own  par- 
ticular fairy  land.  Never  mind  the  oculist, 
therefore,  but,  whenever  you  feel  like  it,  read 
in  the  car. 

One  or  two  technical  considerations  may  be 
dealt  with  in  this  place.  How  to  remember 
what  one  reads  is  one  of  them.  Some  people 
are  blest  with  such  good  memories  that  they 
never  forget  anything  that  they  have  once  read. 
Literary  history  has  recorded  many  miraculous 

memories.     Still,  it  is  quite  possible  to  remem- 

[12] 


Hov)  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

ber  too  much,  and  thus  turn  one's  mind  into  a 
lumber-room  of  useless  information.  A  good 
reader  forgets  even  more  than  he  remembers. 
Probably  we  remember  all  that  is  really  neces- 
sary for  us,  and,  except  in  so  far  as  our  reading 
is  technical  and  directed  toward  some  exact 
science  or  profession,  accuracy  of  memory  is 
not  important.  As  the  Sabbath  was  made  for 
man,  so  books  were  made  for  the  reader,  and, 
when  a  reader  has  assimilated  from  any  given 
book  his  own  proper  nourishment  and  pleasure, 
the  rest  of  the  book  is  so  much  oyster  shell. 
The  end  of  true  reading  is  the  development  of 
individuality.  Like  a  certain  water  insect,  the 
reader  instinctively  selects  from  the  outspread 
world  of  books  the  building  materials  for  the 
house  of  his  soul.  He  chooses  here  and  rejects 
there,  and  remembers  or  forgets  according  to 

the  formative   desire   of   his   nature.     Yet   it 

[13] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

often  happens  that  he  forgets  much  that  he 
needs  to  remember,  and  thus  the  question  of 
methodical  aids  to  memory  arises. 

One's  first  thought,  of  course,  is  of  the  com- 
monplace book.  Well,  have  you  ever  kept  one, 
or,  to  be  more  accurate,  tried  to  keep  one  ? 
Personally,  I  believe  in  the  commonplace  book 
so  long  as  we  don't  expect  too  much  from  it. 
Its  two  dangers  are  (1)  that  one  is  apt  to  make 
far  too  many  and  too  minute  entries,  and  (2) 
that  one  is  apt  to  leave  all  the  remembering  to 
the  commonplace  book,  with  a  consequent  re- 
laxation of  one's  own  attention.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  mere  discipline  of  a  commonplace 
book  is  a  good  thing,  and  if  —  as  I  think  is  the 
best  way  —  we  copy  out  the  passages  at  full 
length,  they  are  thus  the  more  securely  fixed 
in  the  memory.  A  commonplace  book  kept 
with  moderation  is  really  useful,  and  may  be 

[14] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

delightful.  But  the  entries  should  be  made  at 
full  length.  Otherwise,  the  thing  becomes  a 
mere  index,  an  index  which  encourages  us  to 
forget. 

Another  familiar  way  of  assisting  one's  mem- 
ory in  reading  is  to  mark  one's  own  striking 
passages.  This  method  is  chiefly  worth  while 
for  the  sake  of  one's  second  and  subsequent 
readings;  though  it  all  depends  when  one 
makes  the  markings,  —  at  what  time  of  his 
life,  I  mean.  Markings  made  at  the  age  of 
twenty  years  are  of  little  use  at  thirty,  —  ex- 
cept negatively.  In  fact,  I  have  usually  found 
that  all  I  care  to  read  again  of  a  book  read  at 
twenty  is  just  the  passages  I  did  not  mark. 
This  consideration,  however,  does  not  depre- 
ciate the  value  of  one's  comparatively  contem- 
porary markings.     At  the  same  time,  marking, 

like  indexing,  is  apt,  unless  guarded  against, 

[15] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

to  relax  the  memory.  One  is  apt  to  mark  a 
passage  in  lieu  of  remembering  it.  Still,  for 
a  second  reading,  as  I  say,  —  a  second  reading 
not  too  long  after  the  first,  —  marking  is  a 
useful  method,  particularly  if  one  regards  his 
first  reading  of  a  book  as  a  prospecting  of  the 
ground  rather  than  a  taking  possession.  One's 
first  reading  is  a  sort  of  flying  visit,  during 
which  he  notes  the  places  he  would  like  to 
visit  again  and  really  come  to  know.  A  brief 
index  of  one's  markings  at  the  end  of  a  volume 
is  a  method  of  memory  that  commended  itself 
to  the  booklovers  of  former  days,  —  to  Leigh 
Hunt,  for  instance. 

Yet  none  of  these  external  methods,  useful 
as  they  may  prove,  can  compare  with  a  habit 
of  thorough  attention.  We  read  far  too  hur- 
riedly,  too  much  in  the  spirit  of  the  "quick 
lunch."     No  doubt  we  do  so  a  great  deal  from 

[16] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

the  misleading  idea  that  there  is  so  very  much 
to  read.     Actually,  there  is  very  little  to  read, 
—  if  we  wish  for  real  reading,  — and  there  is 
time  to  read  it  all  twice  over.     We  —  Ameri- 
cans —  bolt  our  books  as  we  do  our  food,  and 
so  get  far  too  little  good  out  of  them.     We 
treat  our  mental  digestions  as  brutally  as  we 
treat  our  stomachs.     Meditation  is  the  diges- 
tion of  the  mind,  but  we  allow  ourselves  no 
time  for  meditation.     We  gorge  our  eyes  with 
the  printed  page,  but  all  too  little  of  what  we 
take  in  with  our  eyes  ever  reaches  our  minds 
or  our  spirits.     We  assimilate  what  we  can 
from  all  this  hurry  of  superfluous  food,  and 
the  rest  goes  to  waste,  and,  as  a  natural  conse- 
quence, contributes  only  to  the  wear  and  tear 
of  our  mental  organism. 

Books  should  be  real  things.     They  were  so 

once,  when  a  man  would  give  a  fat  field  in  ex- 

[17] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

change  for  a  small  manuscript;  and  they  are 
no  less  real  to-day,  —  some  of  them.  Each 
age  contributes  one  or  two  real  books  to  the 
eternal  library,  —  and  always  the  old  books 
remain,  magic  springs  of  healing  and  refresh- 
ment. If  no  one  should  write  a  book  for  a 
thousand  years,  there  are  quite  enough  books 
to  keep  us  going.  Real  books  there  are  in 
plenty.  Perhaps  there  are  more  real  books 
than  there  are  real  readers.  Books  are  the 
strong  tincture  of  experience.  They  are  to  be 
taken  carefully,  drop  by  drop,  not  carelessly 
gulped  down  by  the  bottle.  Therefore,  if  you 
would  get  the  best  out  of  books,  spend  a 
quarter  of  an  hour  in  reading,  and  three-quar- 
ters of  an  hour  in  thinking  over  what  you  have 
read. 


[18] 


WHAT  WE  LOOK  FOR  NOWADAYS 
IN  BOOKS 


"  The  soul, 
Forever    and    forever  —  longer    than   soil  is 
brown  and  solid  —  longer  than  water  ebbs 
and  flows."  Walt  Whitman. 


II 

OF  course , in  a  sense,  we  are  all  looking 
for  something  different — for  the  sim- 
ple reason  that  we  are  looking  for 
ourselves,  yet,  far  more  than  they  have  any 
idea  of,  in  spite  of  personal  deflections  of  taste, 
readers  of  the  same  period,  broadly  speaking, 
are  usually  looking  for  the  same  thing. 

When  I  say  readers,  I  mean  readers.  I 
do  not  mean  the  listless  multitude  that  reads 
the  novel  of  the  season  it  knows  not  why,  nor 
do  I  mean  the  little  dancing-masters  of  letters. 
I  mean  people  to  whom,  so  to  say,  reading  is  a 
vital  function;  with  whom  breathing  and  read- 
ing go  together;  those  for  whom  reading  is  the 
main  avenue  of  their  spiritual  and  intellectual 

[21] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

lives,  and  the  books  they  read  a  large  part  of 
their  personal  experience. 

Such  readers  in  any  given  time  are  usually, 
in  spite  of  surface  differences  of  taste,  looking 
for  certain  qualities,  which,  as  we  say,  are 
mysteriously  in  the  air  at  the  moment;  and  it 
is  a  strange  thing  how  those  qualities  manifest 
themselves  in  different  countries  at  the  same 
periods,  in  apparently  independent  manifes- 
tations. Just  as  the  brain  of  the  world  would 
seem  to  quicken  into  new  inventions  or  intel- 
lectual hypotheses  at  the  same  moment,  as 
though  in  obedience  to  some  universal  impulse 
of  advance,  so  the  soul  would  seem  to  flower 
in  different  parts  of  the  world  at  the  same  mo- 
ment. 

When  a  new  thought  has  occurred  to  some 
lonely  philosopher  in  one  part  of  the  world, 
it  will  almost  surely  have  occurred  to  some 

[22] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

other  lonely  philosopher  in  another  part;  and 
whenever  young  people  in  one  country  are 
awakening  to  some  new  mood  of  feeling,  some 
attitude  towards  life  that  seems  to  restore  to  it 
a  lost  freshness  and  sincerity,  they  have,  though 
all  unaware  of  it,  groups  of  young  friends  all 
over  the  world,  equally  enthusiastic,  and,  as  it 
seems  to  them,  equally  adventurous  and  un- 
friended. Nature  is  one  with  the  young,  and 
"the  wide  world  dreaming  of  things  to  come" 
naturally  whispers  its  dreams  into  the  ears  of 
youth  —  youth  sensitive,  passionate,  pure,  and 
so  seriously  bent  on  the  making  of  a  better 
world. 

Books  like,  say,  Wordsworth's  "  Lyrical  Bal- 
lads," or  Goethe's  "Werther,"  are  but  the 
sudden  blossoming  of  a  world-wide  spring  long 
preparing    underground,    and    we,    with    the 

whole  expressive  literature  of  the  nineteenth 

[23] 


Hoiv  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

century  for  our  inheritance,  can  hardly  under- 
stand what  a  thrill  of  freshness,-  what  an  un- 
speakable boon  of  sympathy,  there  must  have 
been  for  the  heart  and  the  mind  in  such  har- 
bingers of  so  new  and  natural  a  style  of  writing, 
after  a  century  so  mundane,  so  urban,  as  the 
eighteenth.  O !  what  a  blessed  sense  of  real- 
ity, what  a  human  touch,  what  a  natural  voice, 
after  so  many  years  of  hollow  elegance  and 
heartless  brilliancy.  So  long  had  the  heart 
been  asking  for  bread,  and  been  given  a  pol- 
ished stone.  But  here  was  Blake,  with  his 
vision  of  a  world  of  the  spirit  which  men 
seemed  to  have  forgotten  for  a  hundred  years; 
and  here  was  Burns  singing  of  human  love 
with  the  pang  and  pathos  of  love  as  men 
really  felt  it — not  mincing  about  it  in  couplets; 
and  here  was  Words  worth  with  the  first  real 

daisies  since  Shakespeare,  and  his  glad  tidings 
of  the  Great  Mother. 

[24] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

The  reaction  against  the  eighteenth  century 
was  the  most  representative  example  of  a  re- 
action that  is  perennial  in  the  history  of  litera- 
ture; for  the  eighteenth  century  itself  was  not 
merely  a  passing  phase  of  humanity:  it  classi- 
cally fixed  a  type  of  living  common  to  all  ages, 
a  certain  materialistic  middle-age  attitude 
towards  life,  to  which  in  every  century  certain 
temperaments  naturally  conform,  and  to  which 
men  of  certain  ages  are  too  apt  to  settle  down. 
All  other  centuries  except  the  eighteenth  seem 
to  have  been  young  once.  The  eighteenth 
century  came  into  the  world  with  all  the  kindly 
disillusionment,  the  modulated  manners,  the 
gracious  comprehension,  the  inhuman  human- 
ity, of  a  man  of  the  world;  and  its  literature, 
with  all  its  brilliant  qualities,  is  correspond- 
ingly mundane  and  middle-aged.  It  treats  of 
life  in  so  urban  a  fashion,  and  in  vain  we  seek 

[25] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

amid  all  its  complacent  perfection  for  that 
sense  of  the  immortal  something  in  mortal 
affairs,  the  realization  or  non-realization  of 
which  is  the  most  important  of  all  the  dividing 
lines  of  human  character,  as  it  is  the  touch- 
stone which  we  grow  more  and  more  to  apply 
to  literature  and  to  all  our  art. 

When  youth  cries  out  that  Pope  is  no  poet, 
and  turns  to  its  Shelley  and  its  Keats,  it  is  this 
quality  it  misses  —  the  thrill  of  a  divine  signif- 
icance in  human  experience  to  which  youth  is 
so  blessedly  alive.  What  is  mere  verbal  dex- 
terity against  this  essential  failure,  this  temper- 
amental omission  in  the  poet's  nature  ?  Merely 
to  be  able  so  skilfully  to  use  such  an  instrument 
as  the  couplet,  an  instrument  so  incapable  of 
those  vibrations  which  are  the  very  soul  and 
mystery  of  music,  argues  at  once  a  spiritual 
limitation  in  the  performer,  is  in  itself  a  suffi- 

[2G] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

cient  sign  that  the  poet  is  a  stranger  to  those 
mystic  intimations  of  immortality,  sensitiveness 
to  which  is  what  we  mean  by  the  poet's  nature. 
And  as  with  Pope,  so  with  Gibbon,  so  with 
all  the  eighteenth  century  —  so  even  with  Dr. 
Johnson.  Even  in  their  loftiest  moments, 
there  is  an  urban  accent  about  their  speech 
which  robs  it  of  sympathetic  appeal,  and,  so 
to  say,  townifies  the  most  elemental  themes 
and  natural  emotions.  Their  attitude  to  the 
heights  and  depths  of  human  existence  is  much 
the  same  as  their  attitude  to  the  sublime  and 
wilder  aspects  of  nature.  The  great  mys- 
teries and  passions  of  the  soul  they  regard  as 
amazing  and  picturesque  phenomena  quite 
external  to  themselves  —  as  tourists  drive  out 
to  see  a  volcano,  or  visitors  to  an  observatory 
gaze  placidly  through  the  big  telescope  at  the 

terrible  stars,  and  then  go  home  contentedly 

[27] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

to  supper.  That  they  have  any  part  in  these 
savage  forces,  and  impressive  mysteries,  ex- 
cept as  observers,  never  seems  to  occur  to 
them.  The  universe  has  culminated  in  the 
coffee-house.  That  they  themselves  are  even 
more  mysterious  than  the  stars,  and  that  there 
is  something  in  the  soul  of  man  piteously  in- 
finite, and  in  his  lot  a  spiritual  agony  of  ascen- 
sion tragically  divine,  are  matters  that  seem 
entirely  undreamed  of  by  these  masters  of 
well  groomed  prose  and  smartly  tailored  verse. 
It  is  for  this  reason  that  youth  and  the 
eighteenth  century  are  born  enemies,  and 
when  I  say  youth  I  mean  that  sensitive  recep- 
tive youth  of  the  spirit  ever  eager  for  the  vital 
touch,  the  expressive  word,  in  books,  which  is 
a  matter  of  temperament  rather  than  years; 
and  when  I  say  eighteenth  century,  I  mean 
that  attitude  and  accent  in   books  which  is 

[28] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

merely  of  this  world,  materialistic,  middle- 
aged,  every  -  day,  settled  -  down  —  all  that 
merely  concrete,  opaque  writing,  unlit  by 
any  inner  dream,  or  untouched  by  any  super- 
nal radiance,  unvisited  by  "whispers  and 
hints  of  the  infinite  sea."  Yes!  the  books  of 
this  world. 

No  history  repeats  itself  so  surely  as  the  his- 
tory of  literature,  and  we  at  the  beginning  of 
the  twentieth  century  are  once  more  in  the 
midst  of  a  similar  reaction  to  that  against  the 
eighteenth  century  of  which  I  have  been  writ- 
ing. Once  more  we  have  been  passing  through 
a  period,  though  a  comparatively  brief  one, 
of  spiritual  eclipse  and  intellectual  materialism ; 
and  once  more,  passing  out  of  it,  we  "  again  be- 
hold the  stars."  Materialism  in  eighteenth 
century  literature  took  the  form  of  what  we 
might  call  Urbanism.     In  the  nineteenth  cen- 

[29] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

tury  it  has  taken  the  form  of  Realism.  In  one 
case  the  eclipse  might  be  said  to  have  come 
through  spiritual  indifference,  in  the  other 
through  spiritual  despair.  With  all  the  splen- 
did literature  of  awakening  which  had  been 
born  of  its  revolt  against  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury, the  nineteenth  century  could  not  fall 
back  into  any  such  placid  torpor  as  that  from 
which  it  had  so  mightily  aroused  itself.  Its 
materialism  was  of  different  origin,  and  came 
rather  from  the  bad  waking  dreams  of  its  too 
eager  watchfulness,  came,  in  fact,  of  those 
nightmares  of  science  before  which  for  a  while 
the  soul  of  man  has  fled  shrieking,  letting  fall, 
as  it  seemed,  all  the  spiritual  gains  of  the  cen- 
turies, and  all  the  natural  dreams  of  the  heart. 
Those  "terrible  muses,"  astronomy,  geology, 
and  especially  biology,  had  come  with  so  much 

grim  science,  and  had  applied  it  so  confidently 

[30] 


WlwX  we  Look  for  in  Books 

to  the  human  mystery,  and,  with  such  apparent 
finality,  so  clearly  demonstrated  not  merely 
man's  insignificance,  but  his  utter  earthiness 
and  kinship  to  "the  beasts  that  perish,"  that 
his  old  dreams  of  himself,  his  noble  spiritual 
warfare,  his  transfiguring  idealisms,  seemed 
lost  to  him  forever,  the  toys  of  his  fanciful 
childhood.  If,  in  the  materialism  of  the  eight- 
eenth century,  man  had  foregone  so  much  of 
his  birthright  as  to  have  shrunk  into  the  fine 
gentleman,  he  still  remained  superficially  hu- 
man; but  the  materialism  of  the  nineteenth 
century  stripped  him  even  of  his  humanity, 
and  in  the  literature  of  so-called  realism  pre- 
sented him  as  la  bete  humaine.  Man  a  spirit! 
Man  is  not  even  a  man!  Man  is  just  this 
beast  we  show  you.  This  is  what  he  calls  his 
love!  This  foul  corpse  is  all  that  comes  of  all 
his  dreams! 

[31] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

The  men  who  wrote  so  believed  in  what 
they  wrote,  wrote  often  what  they  deemed  the 
truth  about  life  in  prophetic  agony  of  soul,  if 
sometimes  with  the  impious  cynicism  of  a  bitter 
disillusion,  to  which  the  pieties  of  the  heart  no 
less  than  those  of  the  churches  had  become  so 
many  empty  words.  It  was  from  the  hurried 
deductions  of  an  immature  science  that  pessi- 
mism, realism,  and  the  varied  cynicism  and 
materialism  of  the  past  thirty  or  forty  years 
have  sprung.  Over  hastily,  some  of  us  may 
think,  man  had  allowed  science  to  rob  him  not 
only  of  God  but  of  his  own  soul,  and  with  the 
loss  of  them  necessarily  went  for  a  while  many 
an  ennobling  faith  and  ideal,  by  which  he  had 
been  wont  to  guide  his  steps  in  a  difficult 
world.  Even  mere  humanity  itself,  as  it  used 
to  be  called,  seems  to  have  been  cast  overboard 
as  useless  from  a  ship  that  has  no  captain  and 

[32] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

no  destination,  and  no  motives  to  restrain  the 
pirate  instincts  of  the  crew.  Thus  we  have 
seen  once  more  the  deification  of  brute  force, 
the  cynical  suppression  of  weak  nations  by  the 
strong,  the  impudent  mockery  of  moral  ideas 
both  in  public  and  private  life,  the  glorification 
of  material  luxury,  which  necessarily  follow 
when  mankind  for  a  time  has  ceased  to  "  think 
nobly  of  the  soul."  All  the  old  brutal  lies 
about  life  have  flourished  once  more  like  green 
bay-trees;  and,  after  all  the  travail  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  we  are  rewarded  with  Mr. 
Chamberlain,  the  German  Emperor,  Mr.  Kip- 
ling  and — Kischenev. 

However,  this  nineteenth  century  material- 
ism is  about  to  pass  away,  as  the  eighteenth 
century  materialism  passed;  and  with  it  its 
literature  of  realism  and  brutality  is  passing, 
too. 

[33] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Return,  Alphseus,  the  dread  voice  is  past 
That   shrunk   thy   streams!    Return,  Sicilian 
muse! 

Tennyson's  "terrible  muses"  have  not,  after 
all,  displaced  the  immortal  nine  from  the  sacred 
hill,  but  only  given,  maybe,  a  still  more  solemn 
note  to  their  song,  taught  them  a  deeper,  more 
cosmic,  strain.  Science  has  proved  no  match 
for  religion,  after  all,  and  whereas  a  short  time 
ago  she  seemed  so  cruel  an  enemy  of  his  soul, 
who  knows  but  that  it  shall  be  she  who  some 
day  shall  prove  that  man  is  indeed  a  spirit;  for 
more  and  more  the  new  laws  of  science  are 
confirming  the  old  laws  of  the  soul.  Mortal 
or  immortal,  man  feels  once  more  that,  be  his 
life  for  a  day  or  for  an  eternity,  it  is  in  some  way 
or  other  of  a  divine  importance  how  he  lives 
it.     Immortal  he  may  not  be,  but  beast  he  is 

not,  nor  shall  his  life  deny  his  mysterious  in- 

[34] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

stincts  of  spiritual  growth  at  the  bidding  of  any 
biologist.  For  short  time  or  long,  it  is  good  to 
be  pure  and  strong  and  gentle,  good  to  have 
loved  nobly  and  worked  worthily,  good  to  have 
hated  evil  and  cruelty,  to  have  protected  the 
weak  and  fed  the  hungry — whatever  the  philos- 
ophers may  say;  and  the  books  that  deny  or 
fail  to  take  account  of  this  indestructible,  if 
irrational,  conscience  in  humanity  will  in  the 
future  be  more  and  more  written  in  vain. 

To  glance  a  while  at  literature  in  the  imme- 
diate present  —  it  seems  just  now  to  be,  so  to 
say,  at  slack  water.  There  are  few,  if  any, 
quite  new  writers  of  importance,  but  there  are 
a  few  young  wn-iters  already  emerged  into  fame, 
who  may  reasonably  be  expected  to  have  their 
greatest  work  before  them,  and  who  are  cer- 
tainly of  sufficient  note  to  show  in  what  direc- 
tion the  tide  is  about  to  run.     Such  writers  are 

[35] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Mseterlinck,  D'Annunzio,  Stephen  Phillips, 
W.  B.  Yeats,  Joseph  Conrad  and  Maurice 
Hewlett.  These,  obviously,  are  very  different 
writers,  but  they  have  one  unmistakable  quality 
in  common,  a  certain  spiritual  romanticism  of 
attitude,  and  a  certain  thrilling  reality  of  style, 
which  again,  for  want  of  a  better  word,  I  must 
call  spiritual;  an  expressiveness  in  which  the 
sensuous  beauty,  often  great,  seems  to  count 
for  less  than  the  accent  of  spiritual  pathos  in 
mortal  things,  which,  perhaps,  who  knows,  is 
the  meaning  of  beauty. 

But  the  chief  significance  of  these  writers  to 
our  present  consideration  is  that  they  are  pop- 
ular. They  are  no  mere  coterie  authors. 
They  sell.  Yet  up  till  quite  lately  nothing 
could  have  seemed  stranger,  or  more  unlikely 
than  their  success.  If  ever  dream-pedlars 
came  to  market,  it  is  these  six  writers.     But  a 

[30] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

very  short  time  ago  there  was  not  one  of  them 
who  might  not  have  taken  Bcddoes'  old  snatch 
to  himself: 

If  there  were  dreams  to  sell, 
Merry  or  sad  to  tell, 
And  the  crier  rang  the  bell, 
Who  then  would  buy ! 

Who  indeed  ?  The  mockery  that  first  greeted 
Maeterlinck  is  hardly  yet  a  matter  of  yesterday. 
Was  there  ten  years  ago  a  forlorner  figure  in 
literature  than  W.  B.  Yeats,  with  his  Irish 
fairies  and  his  haunted  little  star-lit  songs? 
and  who  indeed  could  have  foretold  the  present 
close  association  between  Stephen  Phillips  and 

—  Charles  Frohman.  And  think  of  this,  too! 
It  is  Mr.   Charles  Frohman  who  "presents" 

—  Everyman.  D'Annunzio  is  indeed  tarred 
with  the  brush  of  realism,  but  his  occasional 
grossness  and  perverseness  are  superficial.    The 

[37] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

breath  of  life  in  his  work  is  its  poetic  passion, 
its  imaginative  vision,  and  such  is  of  the  spirit. 
Mr.  Conrad  and  Mr.  Hewlett  again,  writers  in- 
deed different,  though  prose  writers,  are  essen- 
tially poets,  and  the  significance  of  their  work, 
over  and  above  its  literary  qualities,  is  again 
that  same  atmosphere  of  spiritual  romance, 
that  note  of  the  wonder  of  the  world,  which  we 
had  loved  long  since  and  lost  awhile. 

Stevenson  once  wrote,  and  at  the  moment 
he  was  a  voice  crying  in  the  wilderness,  that 
"the  true  realism  is  that  of  the  poets,"  and  it 
is  just  that  realism  of  the  poets  to  which  we 
are  returning.  It  is  not  those  who  dig  about 
the  roots  of  the  rose  of  life  that  know  the  rose, 
though  they  may  well  be  authorities  on  worms. 
The  truth  about  the  rose  is  its  beauty,  and  for 
that  reason  it  has  ever  been  the  faith  of  the  poet 

that  in  the  beauty  of  life  there  is  at  once  mysti- 

[38] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

cally  hidden  and  revealed  life's  very  truth  as 
well.  The  realism  of  the  ugly  is  negative,  the 
realism  of  the  beautiful  is  positive,  and  for  that 
reason  the  realism  of  the  ugly  is  passing  away; 
for  man  lives  not  by  negatives  alone,  and  no 
literature  of  negation  and  misanthrophy  can 
long  continue  to  terrorize  so  human  a  world. 
There  is  too  much  joy  in  life,  too  much  that  is 
clearly  good  and  beautiful,  and  too  strong  an 
instinct  in  man  of  its  mystic  import,  for  him 
long  to  endure  the  books  that  merely  disillu- 
sionize or  defile.  In  fact,  man  cannot  be  dis- 
illusioned, for  the  simple  reason  that  the  in- 
tuitions to  which  he  so  obstinately  clings  are 
not  illusions  at  all;  for  the  man  who  could  call 
religion  and  love  illusions  is  merely  trifling 
with  words,  and  might  as  well  deny  the  force 
of  the  tides.     Illusions  so  motive  in  their  power 

must  surely  be  classed  among  the  realities- 

[39] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

The  "facts  of  life,"  of  which  the  realist  so 
often  reminds  us,  are  not  the  simple  prosaic 
outsides  of  things.  The  commonest  of  them 
rightly  seen  is  full  of  mysterious  suggestion, 
and  all  that  suggestion  is  a  part  of  the  fact. 
To  miss  that  and  to  see  only  the  outsides  is 
surely  to  misrepresent  the  facts.  It  is  the 
highest  value  of  a  fact  rather  than  the  lowest 
which  it  is  important  for  us  to  see,  and  it  is  on 
that  value  that  the  poet  is  always  insisting. 
That  is  his  service  to  the  community.  To 
raise  the  veil  of  familiarity  which  blinds  us  to 
the  strangely  significant  face  of  life,  the  regen- 
eration of  the  world  through  wonder:  for  this 
there  are  poets  still,  and  will  be  as  long  as 
there  is  a  world  to  regenerate.  And  this  ser- 
vice is  what  readers  nowadays  are  more  and 
more  looking  for  to  writers  of  all  kinds.  In- 
stead of  the  poet's  occupation  being  gone,  he 

[40] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

was  never  more  in  demand;  for  the  temper  of 

the   age,   paradoxical   as   the  statement  may 

seem  upon  the  surface,  is  essentially  poetic. 

Its  mood  of  infidel  despair  and  cynical  world- 

liness  is  passing,  and  the  smug  self-confidence 

of  its  science  is  giving  way  to  what  one  might 

call  a  meditative  astonishment,  not  untouched 

with  religion.     Far  from  our  having  guessed 

the  riddle  of  things,  the  riddle  itself  has  gained 

in  mystery  and  fascination.     The  facts  of  life, 

yes!    but  what  wonderful  facts  they  are! 

Such  is  the  growing  mood  of  the  time,  which, 

while  it  tends  on  the  one  hand  to  an  ever  stricter 

demand  for  fidelity  in  literary  material,  is  even 

more  insistent  that  the  interpretation  of  that 

material  shall  be  the  poetic  interpretation  — 

that  is,  the  interpretation  which  gives  it  its 

highest  human  value. 

Take  as  an  example  of  what  I  mean,  a  much 

[41] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

read  recent  story,  Mr.  Conrad's  "  Heart  of  the 
Darkness,"  in  the  volume  entitled  "Youth." 
There  is  nothing  particularly  novel  or  attrac- 
tive in  the  material :  a  relief  expedition  thread- 
ing its  way  up  a  Western  African  river  to 
bring  back  a  certain  Mr.  Kurtz,  the  manager 
of  a  Belgian  ivory  station.  African  adventure 
in  itself  is  hardly  new  enough  to  be  exciting, 
and  much  of  Mr.  Conrad's  material  is  at  first 
sight  dreary,  and  even  disagreeable.  Yet 
what  a  masterpiece  he  has  made  of  it  all,  what 
a  marvellous  poem  —  and  not  by  any  methods 
of  exaggeration,  by  nothing  that  he  has  added, 
but  by  mere  dint  of  seeing  what  icas  there, 
seeing  all  that  was  there,  giving  every  fact  its 
full  value,  its  full  human  value  —  and  to  give 
a  fact  its  full  human  value  is  to  give  it  its  poetic 
value.  Nothing  is,  as  we  say,  "  poetized,"  or  in 
any  way  fictitiously  heightened.     Small  mat- 

[42] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

ters  remain  small,  but  all,  small  or  great,  thrill 
with  the  dread  significance  which  inheres  in 
every  cubic  inch  of  human  life,  had  we  but 
eyes  to  see  it.  Mr.  Conrad  has  the  eyes,  and 
like  every  true  poet  he  writes  so  wonderfully, 
because  he  sees  so  wonderfully.  I  cannot  re- 
member to  have  read  in  a  book  descriptions 
of  scenery  that  were  at  once  so  real,  and  yet  so 
beautiful.  Yet  there  is  no  word-painting.  It 
is  the  fact,  clearly  seen,  closely  set  down  all 
the  time,  but  remember  it  is  all  the  fact  — 
that  is,  all  the  implicit  suggestion  of  the  fact, 
its  spiritual  as  well  as  its  pictorial  value. 

If  Mr.  Conrad  were  merely  a  story-teller, 
and  were  his  yarns  even  more  exciting  than 
they  are,  one  would  hardly  be  writing  of  him 
in  this  way,  nor  indeed  do  I  think  that  it  is  his 
stories,  merely  as  stories,  that  account  for  his 

recent  wide  recognition.     It  is  the  poetic  tern- 

[43] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

per  of  his  work,  which  falls  in  with  the  general 
awakening  of  wonder,  that  at  once  gives  it  its 
value  and  its  opportunity.  I  have  taken  Mr. 
Conrad  as  an  illustration,  rather  than  any 
other  of  the  writers  I  have  named,  because  his 
material  is  less  superficially  poetic  than  theirs. 
You  would  naturally  look  for  romance  in  a 
volume  of  sea  yarns,  but  hardly  romance  of  so 
significant  a  quality  as  Mr.  Conrad  gives  us, 
romance  that  so  clearly  mirrors  the  spiritual 
mood  of  the  time.  No  success  could  more 
clearly  show  which  way  the  wind  is  blowing, 
though  by  signs  and  wonders  on  every  hand  it 
is  very  clear  that  the  tide  of  dreams  is  once 
more  coming  in,  and  the  moon  of  beauty  rising. 
"Let  us  go  forth,  the  tellers  of  tales,"  cries  Mr. 
Yeats,  in  "The  Celtic  Twilight,"  "and  seize 
whatever  prey  the  heart  longs  for  and  have  no 
fear.     Everything   exists,    everything   is   true, 

[44] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Boohs 

and  the  earth  is  only  a  little  dust  under  our 
feet."  This  has  been  the  ery  of  the  poet  in  all 
times,  but  to-day  it  could  almost  be  said  to  be 
the  cry  of  us  all.  A  little  while  ago  and  the 
earth  seemed  all  we  had.  It  was  our  measure 
of  reality.  We  accepted  its  laws  — ■  its  imper- 
fectly apprehended  physics  —  as  a  court  of 
last  appeal.  Humbly  we  surrendered  our 
souls,  in  obedience  to  a  chemical  experiment. 
To-day,  however,  the  earth  is  once  more  "  under 
our  feet,"  and  once  more  we  turn  our  eyes  to 
and  put  our  trust  in  the  stars.  Once  more  we 
say,  fearlessly  facing  the  darkest  facts  against 
us :  Man  is  a  spirit ;  he  lives  not  by  bread  alone ; 
he  is  not  as  the  beasts  that  perish. 

And  thus  once  more  we  are  coming  to  de- 
mand of  our  books  that  they  shall  recognize 
this  dignity  in  man,  this  presage  of  a  divine 

destiny,  that,  in  short,  they  shall  be  "humane." 

[45] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

The  day  of  the  literary  hooligan  is  ended,  —  for 
the  time  being  at  all  events,  —  and  the  occu- 
pation of  the  bestial  pessimist  is  gone.  Once 
more  we  demand  of  our  books  the  loftier  and 
the  finer  realities  of  humanity.  Once  more 
we  demand  pity  and  tenderness  and  beauty 
and  humour.  We  have  been  surfeited  with 
offal  and  literary  butchers-meat,  and  cleaner 
appetites  reawaken  within  us.  If  the  new 
writers  are  not  ready  to  give  us  the  books  we 
crave,  perhaps  their  failure  is  not  an  unmixed 
misfortune,  for  thus  we  shall  be  driven  back  to 
the  old  great  ones,  those  wells  of  living  water 
which  remain  fresh  and  full  through  all  tem- 
porary periods  of  drought.  And  there  are 
signs  that  we  are  thus  returning  to  those  foun- 
tain-heads from  which  such  modern  writers  as 
I  have  named  are,  after  all,  but  little  trickling 
rills.     It   is   becoming   the  fashion   to   reread 

[46] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

Dickens,  and  there  could  hardly  be  a  more 
healthy  sign  of  the  times.  If  only  for  its  good- 
ness of  heart,  not  counting  its  many  other 
great  and  brilliant  qualities,  "  David  Copper- 
field"  must  ever  remain  one  of  the  great  books 
of  the  world.  Goodness  of  heart!  Yes!  that 
has  been  quite  an  unfashionable  quality  in 
literature  for  the  last  fifteen  or  twenty  years. 
Hardness  of  heart  has  been  the  vogue.  To  be 
hard,  and  corrupt,  and  brutal  has  been  the  aim 
of  the  writer  who  would  write  as  the  wind  blew. 
But,  thank  heaven,  a  fresher  wind  is  once  more 
blowing,  and  Dickens  is  but  one  of  the  many 
great  Victorian  writers  whom  it  will  repay  the 
present  generation  to  read  again.  Indeed,  we 
need  be  in  no  hurry  for  new  books,  for  it  is 
hardly  too  much  to  say  that,  if  no  new  book 
were  written  for  a  hundred  years,  there  is  more 
than  enough  unassimilated  virtue  in  the  liter- 

[47] 


Hoio  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

ature  of  the  nineteenth  century  to  meet  the 
most  eager  spiritual  and  intellectual  demands 
of  our  most  precocious  great-grandchildren. 
After  all,  it  is  not  so  much  the  temper  of  the 
writers  of  any  given  age  that  matters  as  the 
temper  of  the  readers  —  for  if  the  writers  of 
one's  own  time  fail  us,  the  writers  of  the  older, 
stronger  times  are  always  there  upon  our 
shelves.  When  we  cry  out  for  new  truth  and 
new  beauty,  would  we  not  do  better  to  ask 
ourselves,  what  use  have  we  made  of  the  old  ? 
There  is  a  good  deal  of  poetry  still  left  in 
Shakespeare,  and,  with  all  our  aestheticism, 
have  we  yet  exhausted  the  beauty  of  Keats  ? 
If  our  hearts  need  laughter,  are  there  no 
more  laughs  left  for  us  in  Aristophanes,  and  Cer- 
vantes, and  Fielding,  and  Dickens,  and  Mark 
Twain  ?  And,  suppose  there  were  no  Maeter- 
linck,   would  we    quite  starve  —  with  Plato  ? 

[48] 


What  we  Look  for  in  Books 

No,  the  reader  in  earnest  need  never  trouble 
himself  about  the  shortcomings  of  his  partic- 
ular generation.  The  books  of  his  day  may 
be  drab  and  sullen,  weary  and  materialistic, 
but  he  has  only  to  turn  to  his  shelves  to  find 
books  of  another  generation  full  of  colour  and 
spirit,  cheerful  books,  books  ashine  with  youth 
and  shaking  with  laughter,  books  inhabited 
by  dreams,  and  grave  with  messages  for  the 
soul.  Perhaps  it  might  be  well  for  the  con- 
temporary writer  to  be  more  urgently  reminded 
that  his  most  important  rivals  are  not  his  con- 
temporaries, and  that  his  own  generation,  if 
needs  be,  can  very  well  do  without  him. 


[49] 


WHAT'S   THE  USE    OF    POETRY? 


And  idly  tuneful,  the  loquacious  throng 
Flutter  and  twitter,  'prodigal  of  time, 

And  little  masters  make  a  toy  of  song 

Till  grave  men  weary  of  the  sound  of  rhyme. 

William  Watson  in  "  Wordsivorth's  Grave." 


Ill 

THERE  is  no  doubt  that  the  majority 
of  people  are  firmly  convinced  that 
they  do  not  care  for  poetry.     They 
have  no  use  for  it,  they  tell  you.     Either  it 
bores  them,  as  a  fantastic,  high-flown  method 
of  saying  something  that,  to  their  way  of  think- 
ing, could  be  better  said  in  plain  prose,  or  they 
look  upon  it  as  the  sentimental  nonsense  of  the 
moonstruck,  lovesick  young ;  a  kind  of  intellec- 
tual "candy"  all  very  well  for  women  and 
children,  but  of  no  value  to  grown  men  with 
the  serious  work  of  the  world  on  their  shoul- 
ders. 

It  is  not  at  all  difficult  to  account  for,  and 
indeed  to  sympathize  with,  this  attitude.     To 

[53] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

begin  with,  of  course,  there  is  a  large  class 
outside  our  present  consideration  which  does 
not  care  for  poetry  simply  because  it  does  not 
care  for  any  literature  whatsoever.  Serious 
reading  of  any  kind  does  not  enter  into  its 
scheme  of  life.  Beyond  the  newspapers,  an 
occasional  novel  of  the  hour,  idly  taken  up, 
indifferently  put  aside,  it  has  no  literary  needs. 
With  this  listless  multitude  we  have  not  to 
concern  ourselves,  but  rather  with  that  suffi- 
ciently heterogeneous  body  known  as  the  read- 
ing public,  the  people  for  whom  Mr.  Car- 
negie builds  the  libraries,  and  the  publish- 
ers display  their  wares.  Of  course,  among 
these  there  must  necessarily  be  a  considerable 
percentage  temperamentally  unappreciative  of 
poetry,  —  just  as  there  are  numbers  of  people 
born  with  no  ear  for  music,  and  numbers  again 
born    with    no    colour    sense.     The  lover    of 

[54] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

poetry  is  no  less  born  than  the  poet  himself. 
Yet,  as  the  poet  is  made  as  well  as  born,  so  is 
his  reader.  There  are  many  who  really  love 
poetry  without  knowing  it,  many  who  think  they 
do  not  care  for  poetry,  —  either  because  they 
have  contracted  a  wrong  notion  of  what  poetry 
is,  or  because  they  have  some  time  or  other 
made  a  bad  start  with  the  wrong  kind  of  poetry. 
I  am  convinced  that  one  widespread  provo- 
cative of  the  prevailing  impression  of  the  fool- 
ishness of  poetry  is  the  mediocre  magazine 
verse  of  the  day.  In  an  age  when  we  go  so 
much  to  the  magazines  for  our  reading,  we 
may  rely  on  finding  there  the  best  work  being 
done  in  every  branch  of  literature  except  — 
the  highest.  The  best  novelists,  the  best  his- 
torians, and  the  best  essayists  write  for  the 
magazines,  but  the  best  poets  must  be  looked 
for  in  their  high-priced  volumes;  a  magazine 

[55] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

reader  must  rely  for  his  verse  on  lady  amateurs 
and  tuneful  college  boys.  Thus  he  too  often  ap- 
proaches poetry,  not  through  the  great  masters 
but  —  the  little  misses;  he  forms  his  naturally 
contemptuous  notion  of  poetry  upon  feeble 
echoes  and  insipid  imitations.  No  wonder, 
therefore,  that  he  should  refuse  to  waste  his 
good  eyesight  on  anything  in  the  shape  of 
verse,  should  conceive  of  poetry  as  a  mild  men- 
tal dissipation  for  young  ladies,  a  sickly  sweet- 
meat made  of  molasses  and  moonshine.  If  the 
magazine  editors  of  the  world  would  only  bind 
themselves  to  publish  no  verse  except  the  best, 
and,  failing  to  obtain  a  contemporary  supply  of 
the  best,  would  fill  their  spare  corners  of  space 
with  reprints  of  the  old  fine  things,  I  am  con- 
vinced that  they  would  do  a  great  deal  toward 
rectifying  this  widespread  misconception  of  an 
art  which,  far  from   being  trivial  and  super- 

[56] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

ficial,  is  of    all  the  arts  the  most  serious,  the 
most  vitally  human.     I  am  not  saying  that  all 
poetry  is  for  all  readers.     There  is  a  section  of 
poetry  known   as  "poet's  poetry,"  which,  of 
necessity,  can  only  appeal  to  those  in  whom 
the  sense  of  beauty,  of  verbal  exquisiteness, 
has  become  specialized.     Spenser  and  Keats, 
for  example,  are  poets  of  the  rainbow.     For 
the  average  reader  their  poems  are  the  lux- 
uries rather  than  the  necessities  of  literature, 
—  though,  in  making  so  rough  and   ready  a 
distinction,    it    must    not    be    forgotten    that 
beauty,  happily,  is  becoming  more  and  more 
a  general  necessity;  nor  must  it  be  forgotten, 
either,  that  rainbows,  refined  and  remote  as 
they  are,  belong  also  to  the  realities.     It  is  the 
reality  of  poetry  that  I   wish,   if  possible,   to 
bring  home  to  readers  in  this  article.     "Some 
flowers,"  says  George  Meredith,  "have  roots 

[57] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Boohs 

deep  as  oaks."  Poetry  is  one  of  those  flowers. 
Instead  of  its  being  a  superficial  decoration  of 
life,  it  is,  rightly  understood,  the  organic  ex- 
pression of  life's  deepest  meaning,  the  essence 
in  words  of  human  dreams  and  human  action. 
It  is  the  truth  of  life  told  beautifully,  —  and 
yet  truthfully. 

There  is  only  one  basis  for  the  longevity  of 
human  forms.  That  basis  is  reality.  No 
other  form  of  human  expression  has  continued 
with  such  persistent  survival  from  the  begin- 
ning until  now  as  poetry  —  from  the  "  Iliad  " 
to  "The  Absent-Minded  Beggar."  It  and 
the  wild  flowers,  for  all  their  adventurous  fra- 
gility, are  as  old,  and  no  less  stable,  than  the 
hills,  —  and  for  the  same  reason,  —  because 
they  are  no  less  real.  The  world  is  apt  to 
credit  prose  with  a  greater  reality  than  poetry ; 
but  the  truth  is  that  the  prose  of  life  is  only 

[58] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

real  in  proportion  as  it  is  vitalized  by  that 
spirit  of  poetry  that  breathes  in  all  created 
things. 

Life  exacts  practical  reasons  for  the  survival 
of  all  its  forms  of  expression,  and  unless  poetry 
served  some  practical  purpose  of  existence,  it 
would  long  since  have  perished.  It  is  because 
poetry  has  a  practical  work  to  do  in  the  world 
that  it  continues,  and  will  continue,  to  exist; 
because  it  is  one  of  the  motive  forces  of  the 
universe,  —  life's  motive  meaning,  one  might 
almost  say,  —  the  nerve  force  of  existence. 

A  great  man  has  defined  it  as  "the  finer 
spirit  of  all  knowledge;"  the  phrase,  though 
limited,  may  help  us  to  a  broader,  deeper  ap- 
prehension of  poetry,  and  help  us  to  say,  too, 
that  poetry  is  the  finer  spirit  of  all  impulse, 
the  finer  meaning  of  all  achievement.     There 

is  no  human  interest  desiring  to  be  displayed 

[59] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Boohs 

in  all  its  essential  vividness  that  does  not  real- 
ize the  value  of  a  poetical  expression. 

Those  who  would  depreciate  the  power  of 
poetry  in  the  sternest  practical  affairs  have 
only  to  be  reminded  how  much  modern  Im- 
perialism owes  to  Mr.  Kipling;  and  it  is  by  no 
means  trivial  to  remark  that  the  most  success- 
ful advertisements  have  been  in  verse.  So 
soon  as  "poetry,"  socalled,  really  is  poetry, 
its  appeal  is  immediately  admitted,  its  force 
undeniably  felt.  It  is  the  false  poets  who  ac- 
count for  the  false  ideas  of  poetry.  One  has 
only  to  confront  a  "practical  man"  with  the 
real  thing  to  convince  him  that,  without  real- 
izing it,  he  has  cared  a  great  deal  about  poetry 
all  his  life.  Probably  he  has  imagined  that  his 
great  stumbling-block  has  been  the  verse. 
"Why  not  say  it  in  plain  English?"  he  has 
impatiently  exclaimed,  —  thinking  all  the  time 

[60] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

of  bad  verse,  of  lifeless  contorted  rhyming,  of 
those  metrical  inanities  of  the  magazines;  and 
yet,  when  you  bring  him  a  verse  that  is  really 
alive,  in  which  the  metre  is  felt  to  be  the  very 
life-beat  of  the  thought,  you  don't  find  him 
asking  to  have  it  turned  into  prose.  How 
about  "Mandalay"  in  prose,  for  example,  or 
that  old  bugle-call  of  Scott's:  — 

Sound,  sound  the  clarion,  fill  the  fife! 

To  all  the  sensual  world  proclaim, 
One  crowded  hour  of  glorious  life 

Is  worth  an  age  without  a  name. 

Or  Tennyson's  "Tears,  idle  tears,"  or  Cole- 
ridge's: — 

He  prayeth  best,  who  loveth  best 
All  things  both  great  and  small; 

For  the  dear  God  who  loveth  us, 
He  made  and  loveth  all. 

Or  "The  quality  of  mercy  is  not  strained,"  or 

[61] 


Hoiv  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

"Under  the  greenwood  tree,"  or  Mr.  Swin- 
burne's :  — 

Ask  nothing  more  of  me,  sweet; 

All  I  can  give  you  I  give. 
Heart  of  my  heart,  were  it  more, 

More  would  be  laid  at  your  feet: 
Love  that  should  help  you  to  live, 

Song  that  should  spur  you  to  soar. 

In  all  these  cases  the  verse  is  immediately 
felt  to  be  the  very  life  of  the  expression,  —  for 
the  reason  that  it  echoes  in  words  the  life- 
rhythms  to  which  unconsciously  all  such  hu- 
man emotions  keep  time.  Say  it  in  prose! 
Can  you  say  a  trumpet  in  prose,  or  a  tear,  or  a 
butterfly?  If  you  can,  your  prose  is  really 
poetry,  and  will  be  found  to  be  eloquent  with 
sunken  rhythms,  not  immediately  obvious  to 
the  ear  and  eye. 

The  first  thing  to  realize  about  poetry  is  that 
the  metre  is  the  meaning,  —  even  more  than 

[62] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

the  words.  In  the  just  quoted  "Tears,  idle 
tears,"  for  example,  it  is  not  so  much  the  words 
that  are  accountable  for  the  wistful  sorrow  of 
the  general  effect  as  the  sad  rain-like  melody 
mysteriously  charging  the  words  with  sorrow, 
like  some  beautiful  interpretative  voice;  and 
it  is  this  subtly  mimetic  quality,  endlessly  adapt- 
able, which  is  the  raison  d'etre  of  metre,  and 
the  secret  of  its  power  over  mankind. 

Perhaps  it  may  help  us  to  attempt  here  a 
definition  of  poetry,  —  though  it  is  a  bold,  even 
foolhardy,  thing  to  do,  for  there  has  never  yet 
been  a  definition  of  poetry  that  satisfied  anyone 
but  the  man  who  made  it.  We  may  recall  one 
fashionable  in  its  day,  Matthew  Arnold's 
"Poetry  is  a  criticism  of  life."  That  a  poet 
should  have  made  such  a  narrowing  definition 
is  amazing,  though  one  of  course  understands 
it,  in  the  light  of  the  fact  that  the  inspiration 

[63] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

of  Matthew  Arnold's  muse  was  almost  entirely 
that  of  a  philosophical  criticism  of  life.  Far 
from  being  a  criticism  of  life,  poetry  is  much 
more  like  a  re-creation  of  it.  It  is  life  —  in 
words.  But  let  me  timidly  launch  my  own 
definition :  — 

Poetry  is  that  impassioned  arrangement  of 
words  (whether  in  verse  or  prose)  which  em- 
bodies the  exaltation,  the  beauty,  the  rhythm, 
and  the  pathetic  truth  of  life. 

There  is  a  motive  idealism  behind  all  human 
action  of  which  most  of  us  are  unconscious,  or 
to  which  we  ordinarily  give  but  little  thought, 
a  romance  of  impulse  which  is  the  real  signifi- 
cance of  human  effort.  The  walls  of  Thebes 
were  built  to  music  according  to  the  old  story, — 
but  so  were  the  walls  of  every  other  city  that 
has  ever  been  built.  The  sky-scrapers  of  New 
York  are  soaring  to  music  also,  —  a  masterful 

[64] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

music  of  the  future,  which  not  all  can  hear,  and 
of  which  perhaps  the  music-makers  themselves 
are  most  ignorant  of  all.  Once  more  in  Emer- 
son's immortal  phrase,  the  builders  are  building 
better  than  they  know,  —  these  ruthless  specu- 
lators, stern  business-men,  who  are  the  last  to 
suspect  themselves  of  the  poetry  which  they 
involuntarily  serve. 

Human  life,  in  the  main,  is  thus  unconsciously 
poetical,  and  moves  to  immortal  measures  of  a 
mysterious  spiritual  music.  It  is  this  impas- 
sioned exaltation,  this  strange  rhythm,  this 
spiritual  beauty,  —  "  the  finer  spirit "  of  life,  — 
which  the  poet  seizes  on,  and  expresses  there- 
with, also,  that  pathos  which  seems  to  inhere  in 
all  created  things.  We  read  him  because  he 
gives  that  value  to  life  which  we  feel  belongs 
to  it,  but  for  which  we  are  unable  to  find  the 
words  ourselves.     How  often  one  has  heard 

[65] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  BooJcs 

people  say,  on  reading  a  poem:  "Why,  that  is 
just  what  I  have  always  felt,  but  could  never 
express!"  —  and  the  exclamation  was  ob- 
viously a  recognition  of  the  truth  of  the  poem. 
The  poet  had  made  a  true  observation,  and 
recorded  it  with  all  vividness  of  truth.  It  is 
the  business  of  the  poet  to  be  all  the  time  thus 
recording,  and  re-creating,  life  in  all  its  manifes- 
tations, not  only  for  those  who  already  possess 
something  of  the  poetic  vision,  yet  lack  the 
poet's  utterance,  but  also  for  those  who  need 
to  be  awakened  to  the  ideal  meanings  and 
issues  of  life.  Poetry  is  thus  seen  to  be  a  kind 
of  lay  religion,  revealing  and  interpreting  the 
varied  beauty  and  nobility  of  life. 

But  a  better  way  than  theorizing  to  show  the 
"use"  —  the  sweet  uses  —  of  poetry  is  to  call 
up  the  names  of  some  of  the  great  poets,  and 
ponder  what  they  have  meant,  and  still  mean,  in 

[66] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

the  life  of  humanity,  —  Dante,  Milton,  and 
Wordsworth  for  example;  and  to  them  we 
might  add  Tennyson,  Browning,  Matthew  Ar- 
nold. How  much  these  six  poets  alone  have 
meant  to  the  graver  life  of  humanity:  the  life 
of  religion,  of  thought,  of  conduct!  Particu- 
larly with  regard  to  the  four  poets  of  the  last 
century  we  are  compelled  to  note  how,  far  more 
than  any  professed  teachers  and  thinkers,  they 
were  the  teachers  and  thinkers  of  their  age, 
and  did  indeed  mould  the  thought  of  their  cen- 
turies. For  how  many  have  Wordsworth's 
"Prelude,"  Tennyson's  "In  Memoriam," 
Browning's  "Rabbi  Ben  Ezra,"  and  Matthew 
Arnold's  "Empedocles"  been  literally  sacred 
books,  books  of  daily  exercise  and  meditation, 
—  to  name  only  a  few  of  their  more  typical 
poems.  They  are  well-worn  to-day,  but  think 
what  forces  in  the  world  these  lines  of  Words- 
worth have  been : — 

[67] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

The  world  is  too  much  with  us;  late  and  soon, 
Getting   and   spending,    we   lay   waste   our 

powers : 
Little  we  see  in  nature  that  is  ours; 

We  have  given  our  hearts  away,  a  sordid  boon ! 

Or  these  of  Tennyson :  — 

Are  God  and  Nature  then  at  strife, 
That  Nature  lends  such  evil  dreams  ? 
So  careful  of  the  type  she  seems, 

So  careless  of  the  single  life ; 

That  I,  considering  everywhere 
Her  secret  meaning  in  her  deeds, 
And  finding  that  of  fifty  seeds 

She  often  brings  but  one  to  bear, 

I  falter  where  I  firmly  trod, 

And  falling  with  my  weight  of  cares 
Upon  the  great  world's  altar-stairs 

That  slope  through  darkness  up  to  God, 

I  stretch  lame  hands  of  fate,  and  grope, 
And  gather  dust  and  chaff,  and  call 
To  what  I  feel  is  Lord  of  all, 

And  faintly  trust  the  larger  hope. 

Or  these  of  Browning :  — 

Not  on  the  vulgar  mass 

Called  "  work  "  must  sentence  pass, 

[68] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

But  all  the  world's  coarse  thumb 

And  finger  failed  to  plumb, 
So  passed  in  making  up  the  main  account; 

All  instincts  immature, 

All  purposes  unsure, 
That  weighed  not  as  his  work,  yet  swelled  the 
man's  account: 

Thought  hardly  to  be  packed 

Into  a  narrow  act, 
Fancies    that    broke    through    language    and 
escaped ; 

All  I  could  never  be, 

All  men  ignored  in  me, 
This    I  was  worth  to  God,  whose  wheel  the 
pitcher  shaped. 

And,  finally,  these  of  Matthew  Arnold:  — 

Is  it  so  small  a  thing 

To  have  enjoyed  the  sun, 
To  have  lived  light  in  the  spring, 

To  have  loved,  to  have  thought,  to  have  done; 
To  have  advanced  true  friends,  and  beat  down 
baffling  foes; 

That  we  must  feign  a  bliss 

Of  doubtful  future  date, 
And,  while  we  dream  on  this, 

Lose  all  our  present  state, 
And  relegate  to  worlds  yet  distant  our  repose  ? 

[69] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

These  lines,  and  many  more  like  them  that 
one  could  quote,  have  done  definite  spiritual 
service  for  mankind,  have  inspired  countless 
men  and  women  with  new  faith,  new  hope, 
and  new  fortitude,  and  will  remain  perma- 
nent springs  of  sustenance  for  the  human 
spirit. 

Again,  the  mere  mention  of  such  names  as 
Goethe,  Byron,  and  Shelley  carries  with  it 
their  tremendous  significance  in  the  "practi- 
cal" life  of  the  modern  world.  When  we 
think  of  such  figures  as  occur  over  and  over 
again  in  the  history  of  poetry,  we  realize  that 
Tennyson's  "  one  poor  poet's  scroll  "  that 
"  shook  the  world  "  was  no  mere  boyish  infla- 
tion of  the  poet's  mission.  That  sad  musical 
poet  Arthur  O'Shaughnessy  said  no  more  than 
the  truth  when  he  sang,  —  in  verse  like  the 

motion  of  moonlight  on  water:  — 

[70] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

We  are  the  music-makers, 

And  we  are  the  dreamers  of  dreams, 
Wandering  by  lone  sea-breakers, 

And  sitting  by  desolate  streams; 
World-losers  and  world-forsakers, 

On  whom  the  pale  moon  gleams: 
Yet  we  are  the  movers  and  shakers 

Of  the  world  forever,  it  seems. 

To  realize  what  a  sheerly  political  force 
poetry  has  been  in  America  alone,  one  has  only 
to  recall  the  poems  of  Whittier  and  Lowell, 
and  Julia  Ward  Howe's  immortal  "Battle 
Hymn  of  the  Republic." 

But,  apart  from  such    stern  services,  how 

many    other    services    no    less    valuable    has 

poetry  rendered  to  mankind,  —  services  of  joy 

and  universal  sympathy!    The  poet,  often  so 

sad  himself,  sings  all  men's  joys  and  sorrows  as 

if  they  were  his  own;  there  is  nothing  that  can 

happen  to  us,  nothing  we  can  experience,  no 

stroke  of  fate,  and  no  mood  of  heart  or  mind, 

[71] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

that  we  cannot  find  expressed  and  interpreted 
for  us  somewhere  in  some  poet's  book.  Take 
but  one  poet,  —  Robert  Burns,  for  instance,  — 
think  of  the  immense  addition  to  the  sum-total 
of  human  pleasure  and  human  consolation 
that  his  handful  of  Scotch  songs  has  made. 
Who  asks,  "What's  the  use  of  poetry?"  when 
he  joins  in  "Auld  lang  syne,"  and  feels  his 
heart  stirred  to  its  tearful  depths  with  the  sen- 
timent of  human  brotherhood,  and  the  almost 
tragic  dearness  of  friends.  And  who  that  has 
ever  been  in  love  has  not  once  in  his  life  felt 
the  brotherly  hand  of  a  fellow  experience  in  — 

Had  we  never  loved  sae  kindly, 
Had  we  never  loved  sae  blindly, 
Never  met,  —  or  never  parted,  — 
We  had  ne'er  been  broken-hearted,  — 

and  been  consoled  somehow  with  that  mys- 
terious consolation  which  belongs  to  the  perfect 

expression  of  sorrow. 

[72] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry  ? 

If  the  simple  songs  of  a  Scotch  peasant  have 
been  of  so  much  "use"  to  the  world,  what  of  that 
lordly  pleasure-house  of  Shakespeare  ?  Think 
of  the  boundless  universe  of  mere  delight  that 
has  written  over  its  door,  "  The  Works  of 
Shakespeare,"  —  the  laughter,  the  wisdom, 
the  beauty,  the  all-comprehending  humanity. 

If  it  be  of  no  use  to  make  men  happy,  to 
quicken  in  them  the  joy  of  life,  to  heighten  their 
pleasures,  to  dry  their  tears,  to  bind  up  their 
wounds  ;  if  it  be  of  no  use  to  teach  them  wisdom, 
to  open  their  eyes,  to  purify  and  direct  their 
spirits,  to  gird  them  to  fight,  to  brace  them  to 
endure,  to  teach  them  to  be  gentle ;  then,  in- 
deed, we  may  well  ask,  "  What's  the  use  of 
poetry  ?  "  —  But,  while  poetry  can  do  all  these 
things,  I  think  it  must  be  allowed  by  the  most 
practical  that  it  has  a  very  important  part  to 

play  in  the  work  of  the  world. 

[73] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

To  end,  as  I  began,  with  that  practical  man 
who  imagines  that  he  does  not  care  for  poetry 
—  I  gave  one  or  two  explanations  of  his  distaste, 
but  there  is  one  other  important  one  that  must 
not  be  forgotten.  He  begins  too  often  with 
"  Paradise  Lost."  I  mean  that  he  too  often  at- 
tempts some  tough  classic,  before  he  is  ready 
for  it ;  and,  because  he  cannot  read  Milton  with 
pleasure,  imagines  that  he  does  not  care  for 
poetry  at  all.  Thus  he  finds  himself  bewil- 
dered by  the  insipid  magazine  muses  on  the 
one  hand,  and  the  unscalable  immortals  on  the 
other.  Too  many  make  the  famous  Mr.  Bof- 
fin's mistake  by  beginning  the  study  of  English 
literature  with  Gibbon's  "Decline  and  Fall"; 
and  what  wonder  if  a  man  beginning  the  study 
of  English  poetry  with  Browning's  "Sordello" 
should  imagine,  like  Douglas  Jerrold  in  the 
story,  either  that  his  mind  was  failing  him,  or 

[74] 


What's  the  Use  of  Poetry? 

that  there  was  something  radically  wrong  with 
the  poet !  Actually  a  man  may  love  poetry  very 
deeply,  yet  care  nothing  at  all  for  "Paradise 
Lost."  He  may  also  find  nothing  for  him  in 
Homer  or  iEschylus  or  Dante  or  Goethe. 
The  great  architectural  works  of  such  masters 
may  seem  too  godlike  and  grim  for  his  gentler 
human  need.  But  give  him  a  handful  of  violets 
from  Ophelia's  grave,  or  a  bunch  of  Herri ck's 
daffodils,  or  take  him  out  under  the  sky  where 
Shelley's  lark  is  singing,  or  try  him  with  a  lyric 
of  Heine's,  or  some  ballad  of  — 

.  .  old,  unhappy,  far-off  things, 
And  battles  long  ago,  — 

and  you  will  see  whether  or  not  he  loves  poetry. 
The  mistake  is  in  thinking  that  all  poetry  is 
for  all  readers.  On  the  contrary,  the  realm  of 
poetry  is  as  wide  as  the  world,  for  the  very  rea- 
son that  each  man  may  find  there  just  what  he 

[75] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

needs,  and  leave  the  rest.  The  thing  is  to  dis- 
cover the  poetry  that  is  meant  for  us.  Perhaps 
the  best  way  to  do  that  is  to  turn  over  the  pages 
of  some  well-made  selection,  and  see  where  our 
eyes  get  caught  and  held.  Palgrave's  "Gol- 
den Treasury"  is,  of  course,  the  classical  an- 
thology, a  little  volume  filled  with  the  purest 
gold  of  English  lyrical  poetry.  If  a  man  should 
read  in  that  for  an  hour,  and  find  nothing  to 
his  taste,  it  is  to  be  feared  that  he  was  born 
deaf  to  the  sweet  rippling  of  the  Pierian  spring. 
But,  as  I  have  said,  I  believe  that  few  have  been 
so  hardly  treated  by  nature.  "A  poet  died 
young  in  every  one  of  us,"  said  some  one.  I 
think  he  did  not  so  much  die  as  fall  asleep,  nor 
is  he  so  fast  asleep  but  that  the  right  song  sung 
aright  would  awaken  him. 

What  is  the  use  of  poetry?     It  is  just  the 

whole  use  of  living,  —  and  let  anyone  who 

[7G] 


What's  the  Use  oj  Poetry? 

doubts  it  buy  "The  Golden  Treasury,"  and 
enter  the  garden  for  himself. 

Ay,  come  ye  hither  to  this  pleasant  land, 

For  here  in  truth  are  vines  of  Engaddi, 
Here  golden  urns  of  manna  to  thy  hand, 

And  rocks  whence  honey  flows  deliriously; 

Udders  from  which  comes  frothing  copiously 
The  milk  of  life,  ears  filled  with  sweetest  grains, 

And  fig  trees  knowing  no  sterility; 
Here  Paradisal  streams  make  rich  the  plains, 
O!  come  and  bathe   therein,  ye   world-worn 
weary  swains. 


[77] 


WHAT    AN  UNREAD  MAN 
SHOULD  READ 


"  No  profit  is  where  is  no  pleasure  ta'en  : 
In  brief,  sir,  study  what  you  most  affect" 

Shakespeare. 


IV 

IN  answering  this  question,  which  is  some- 
times put  to  one,  I  shall  assume  that  the 
"  unread  man  "  is  a  man  of  fair  commer- 
cial education  who  has  had  little  time  or  op- 
portunity for  reading,  but  is  anxious,  with 
such  leisure  as  he  enjoys,  to  make  a  beginning. 
It  is  obvious  that  one's  advice  must  be  mainly 
general,  and,  only  in  a  very  limited  degree, 
particular.  It  would  be  easy  to  answer  the 
question  academically,  and,  with  a  list  of  for- 
bidding classics,  frighten  away  the  timid 
seeker.  Thus  many  a  man  has  missed  the 
way  to  the  pleasant  gardens   of  the  Muses, 

awed   by  stern   presences   speaking  unknown 
tongues  at  the  gates. 

[81] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Or,  one  might  answer  it  according  to  his 
taste,  and  prescribe  a  diet  of  his  own  favorite 
authors. 

Or,  again,  one  might  bid  the  unread  man 
read  what  he  has  a  mind  to:  "In  brief,  sir, 
study  what  you  most  affect ";  and,  if  the  unread 
man  has  sufficient  leisure,  perhaps  the  best 
way  would  be  to  turn  him  loose  in  a  library  to 
forage  for  himself,  relying  upon  his  own  in- 
stinct to  find  for  hini  his  own  food.  Many  fine 
minds  have  been  nourished  on  this  principle, 
and  it  is  a  principle  which  it  is  of  the  first  im- 
portance to  take  into  account  in  answering 
this  question.  No  one  can  help  a  reader  who 
is  not  able  to  help  himself  even  more. 

At  the  same  time,  it  is  possible,  in  a  general 
way,  allowing  for  all  differences  of  tastes,  for 
one  who  knows  and  loves  books  to  help  another 
who  is  but  beginning  to  love  them,  and  is  won- 

[82] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

deringly  standing  on  the  threshold  of  that  tem- 
ple of  humanity  which  we  call  a  library.  How 
much  time  one  would  have  saved  when  he  was 
young,  how  many  fruitless  wanderings  in  by- 
ways that  led  nowhere,  how  many  wrong  turn- 
ings, how  much  stupid,  unproductive  labor  he 
would  have  avoided,  if  there  had  only  been  a 
wisely  read  friend  at  his  shoulder,  who  knew 
both  books  and  his  friend,  to  say,  "You  needn't 
trouble  about  that!"  or,  "There  is  nothing 
there  for  you,"  or,  "Have  a  try  at  this  book, 
and  see  how  it  hits  you,  my  friend!" 

Such  a  friend  might,  of  course,  lead  one  astray 
occasionally,  and  no  human  being  can  know 
exactly  another's  natural  way  among  books; 
but  such  a  friend  would,  unquestionably,  have 
saved  one  much  expense  of  spirit,  and  rescued 
him  from  many  a  bad  model  and  dull,  unprofit- 
able volume. 

[83] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Among  the  few  general  counsels  which  I 
venture  humbly  to  offer  on  this  matter,  the 
first  and  most  important  for  the  unread  man  to 
remember  is  this:  Beware  of  literary  super- 
stition. Naturally,  the  timid  seeker  whom  I 
have  in  mind  is  liable  to  feel  a  little  awed  before 
enthroned  literary  authority.  In  a  sense,  it  is 
the  proper  attitude  for  a  beginner,  but  it  must 
be  accompanied  by  a  courageous  adherence 
to  his  own  impressions.  For  example,  if  some 
one  has  advised  you  to  read  the  "Iliad,"  and 
you  cannot,  for  the  life  of  you,  see  anything  in 
it,  while,  at  the  same  time,  you  are  shamefully 
conscious  that  it  is  a  "classic,"  and  that  it  is 
your  moral  duty  to  enjoy  it  in  spite  of  yourself, 
—  the  thing  to  do  is  to  be  perfectly  honest  with 
yourself,  and  put  Homer  by,  —  at  all  events, 
for  the  time.  The  day  may  come  when, 
through  the  changes  wrought  in  your  taste  by 

[84] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

various  other  reading,  you  may  enjoy  Homer, 
after  all,  and  realize  why  so  many  generations 
of  men  have  delighted  in  him,  —  why,  in  short, 
his  works  are  classic. 

Meanwhile,  however,  there  is  no  use  in  your 
trying  to  feel  what  you  do  not  feel ;  for  reading 
is  nothing  if  not  sincere,  and  its  profit  is  not 
easily  separable  from  its  pleasure.  I  have 
taken  the  "Iliad"  merely  as  an  example  of 
those  world-famous  books  which,  gathered 
from  every  branch  of  literature,  compose  the 
heterogeneous  assemblage  of  the  immortals, 
and  all  of  which  the  bewildered  unread  man, 
when  he  takes  his  first  respectful  look  at  their 
embattled  names  on  the  bookshelf,  supersti- 
tiously  feels  it  his  mighty  responsibility  to 
digest. 

He  is  not,  as  yet,  in  a  position  to  discriminate 
between   such   superior  beings   as   "standard 

[85] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

authors,"  or  to  realize  that  while,  in  a  sense, 
both   "Don   Quixote"    and   the   "Wealth   of 
Nations"  are  "classics,"  they  are  classics  so 
different  in  character  and  importance  that  one 
he  certainly  should  not  miss,  and  the  other  no 
one  need  read  again  as  long  as  the  world  lasts. 
One  is  a  book  that  will  keep  the  world's  heart 
warm  with  laughter  forever;  the  other  is  an 
able  treatise  on  economics,  of  value,  of  course, 
to  the  technical  student,  but  so  far  as  it  con- 
cerns the  general  reader,  accessible  to  him  in 
the  handier  manuals  of  briefer  and  later  writers. 
Many  such  epoch-making  books  in  science 
and  philosophy,  and  even  history,  may  thus  be 
set   aside   by  the   unread   man,  —  unless,    of 
course,  he  proposes  to  become  a  specialist  in 
any  of  those  branches  of  study;  and,  of  course, 
the  specialist  I  am  not  presuming  to  advise: 
such  books,  for  example,  as  those  grim  pres- 

[86] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

ences  on  our  grandfather's  shelves,  —  "Locke 
on  the  Human  Understanding,"  Bacon's  "No- 
vum Orqanum"  Kant's  " Critique  of  Pure 
Reason,"  the  vital  essences  of  which  have 
passed  into  later  thinkers  and  are  summed  up 
in  a  few  labor-saving  pages  in,  say,  Lewes's 
attractive  "History  of  Philosophy";  or  such 
dry  superseded  histories  as  those  of  Hallam; 
books  which  seem  to  keep  their  places  in  our 
libraries  by  sheer  obstinacy,  or  the  misguided 
charity  of  those  librarians  who  would  seem  to 
consider  a  library  as  a  home  for  dull  and  de- 
cayed authors. 

I  conceive  that  the  business  of  the  unread 
man  is  with  the  living  classics  in  the  world's 
literature,  not  with  those  books  whose  work  is 
done,  —  the  embalmed  ancestors  of  modern 
thought;  and  here,  of  course,  he  has,  indeed, 

the  world  before  him,  and  the  question  where 

[87] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

to  begin  may  well  puzzle  him.  How,  from 
this  vast  storehouse,  shall  he  choose  that  which 
will  best  nourish  his  spirit,  build  up  his  mind, 
make  his  character,  and  be  most  suitable  gen- 
erally to  his  own  individual  development  ?  For 
I  am  assuming  that  the  aim  of  our  average  un- 
read man  is  neither  mere  pleasure  on  the  one 
hand,  nor  mere  knowledge  on  the  other.  In 
addition  to  wishing  to  know,  in  Matthew  Ar- 
nold's phrase,  "the  best  that  has  been  thought 
and  said  in  the  world,"  he  wishes  to  laugh  with 
the  great  laughers,  dream  with  the  great  dream- 
ers, and  do  with  the  great  doers.  It  is  a  broad 
human  culture  he  seeks,  the  means  of  which 
is  knowledge,  and  the  process  of  which  is  pleas- 
ure. 

Of  course,  the  conventional  counsel  would 
be:  Let  him  read  the  best.  That  the  best  in 
literature,  as  in  life  generally,  is  best  for  us, 

[88] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

there  can  be  no  disputing.  But  the  difficulty 
is  that  the  taste  for  the  best  is  not  always  in- 
stinctive, and  that  our  unread  man  might  well, 
at  first,  find  the  best  somewhat  stern  and  unat- 
tractive food.  He  has  to  be  coaxed  into  ap- 
preciating it.  Mark  Pattison  once  said  that 
an  appreciation  of  Milton  is  one  of  the  last 
rewards  of  a  ripe  and  strenuous  scholarship. 
The  remark  was  somewhat  bigotedly  academ- 
ical,—  for,  surely,  one  may  enjoy  Milton's 
earlier  poems,  particularly  (and  perhaps  they 
are  his  best),  without  any  more  scholarship 
than  is  necessary  to  enjoy  a  bird's  singing,  — 
yet  it  is  true,  as  an  extreme  example  of  the 
truth,  that  the  taste  for  the  best  in  literature, 
while  it  must  be  born  in  us,  has  to  be  made  as 
well. 

The  mere  taste  for  reading  itself,  the  mere 

undisciplined  appetite  for  printed  matter  of 

[89] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

any  kind,  is,  of  course,  the  indispensable  basis. 
As  soon  as  anyone  loves  reading,  —  for  read- 
ing's sake,  —  and  has  formed  a  habit  of  de- 
vouring any  books  that  come  his  way,  the 
chances  are  that  the  passion  will  refine  itself, 
in  the  end,  and  the  man  who  began,  maybe, 
with  detective  novels  ends  with  a  fine  appre- 
ciation of  Shakespeare.  Perhaps  the  best  way 
for  the  unread  man  to  form  a  habit  of  reading 
is  to  begin  with  novels.  But,  by  this  method, 
the  effort  to  begin  with  the  best  need  not, 
surely,  be  too  arduous.  Here,  at  least,  it  is 
not  the  classics,  but  their  cheap  imitators, 
which  are  dull  and  wearisome.  If,  as  I  was 
saying,  you  approach  literature  by  the  gate  of 
the  detective  novel,  why  not  begin  with  the 
best?  Why  waste  your  time,  as  the  adver- 
tisers   say,    on    "  worthless    imitations "  ?     No 

detective  novel  of  our  generation  is  worthy  to 

[90] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

be  mentioned  with  Wilkie  Collins's  "The 
Moonstone";  and  Edgar  Allan  Poe's  "The 
Murders  in  the  Rue  Morgue"  was  the  father 
of  them  all. 

So  it  is  with  the  historical  novel.  For  sev- 
eral years  we  have  been  suffering  from  a  pro- 
longed epidemic  of  the  imitation  historical 
novel.  Here  and  there  has  been  produced  a 
respectable  dramatization  of  local  history,  but 
it  is  almost  astonishing  to  think  that  a  literary 
fashion  could  have  prevailed  for  so  long  with- 
out producing  a  single  book  of  even  moderate 
importance.  When  one  thinks  of  all  that 
splendid  dream-world  of  Dumas,  and  of  such 
single  books  as  Charles  Reade's  "The  Cloister 
and  the  Hearth",  or  the  too  little  known  "Si- 
donia,  the  Sorceress"  of  Meinhold;  or  recalls 
even  Shorthouse's  "John  Inglesant,"  it  is  al- 
most inconceivable  that  a  public  can  be  found 

[91] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

for  the  pasteboard  and  tinsel  imitations  which 
congest  the  bookshops,  except  on  the  supposi- 
tion that  the  public  buys  the  imitation  in  igno- 
rance of  the  real. 

Then,  if  you  seek  the  novel  for  laughter  and 
tears,  for  poignant  presentation  or  subtle  analy- 
sis of  the  human  story,  where  can  you  go,  except 
to  those  writers  who  are  already  classic,  or  to 
such  living  writers  as  are  fast  becoming  so? 
No  one  has  written  a  really  amusing  book 
since  Mark  Twain  stopped  writing  —  amusing 
books;  and  no  one  else  has  ever  done  them 
quite  as  well  as  Charles  Dickens.     A  short 

time  ago  it  was  the  fashion  to  sneer  at  Dick- 
ie 

ens;  but  that  fashion,  too,  is  passing,  and 
Dickens  remains,  as  he  must  always  remain, 
one  of  the  eternal  comforts  of  the  human  spirit. 
The  other  day,  I  came  upon  a  little  girl  of 
about  twelve  years  laughing  over  a  book  as  if 

[92] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

her  heart  would  break.  I  asked  about  the 
book,  but  she  could  hardly  tell  me  the  title  for 
laughing.  It  was  the  "Pickwick  Papers!" 
Did  I  know  it  ?  It  was  a  new  book  for  her,  — 
though,  alas !  I  have  myself  been  familiar  with 
it  for  quite  a  while,  —  as  it  will  be  a  new  book 
for  her  great-grandchildren  and  their  children. 
An  unread  man,  therefore,  cannot  afford  to 
miss  Dickens,  any  more  than  he  can  afford  to 
miss  Fielding  and  Sterne  and  Scott  and  Jane 
Austen  and  Thackeray  and  George  Eliot  and 
George  Meredith  and  Thomas  Hardy,  —  to 
name  only  English  writers.  To  speak  of  the 
great  continental  writers  he  can  even  less  afford 
to  neglect  would  make  this  article  too  much  of 
a  catalogue.  Cervantes  and  Balzac  and  Victor 
Hugo  and  Dumas  and  Tolstoi  must  be  named. 
When  he  has  read  those,  all  the  other  lesser 

writers  one  might  name  will  be  added  unto 

[93] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Boohs 

him.  He  will  need  no  one's  advice  by  the 
time  he  is  through  with  Balzac. 

There  are  many  American  authors  whose 
books  should  not  be  omitted  from  the  shelves 
of  an  unread  man.  Chief  among  them  I  may 
name  those  of  Washington  Irving,  Fenimore 
Cooper,  Edgar  Allan  Poe,  Ralph  Waldo  Em- 
erson,  Henry  Wadsworth  Longfellow,  John 
Greenleaf  Whittier,  James  Russell  Lowell,  Na- 
thaniel Hawthorne  and  Bret  Harte. 

The  obvious  advantage  of  beginning  with 
the  novel,  aside  from  its  providing  a  pleasant 
introduction  to  the  reading  habit,  is  that  more 
and  more  the  novel  is  coming  to  absorb  all 
other  branches  of  literature  into  itself.  In  ad- 
dition to  its  own  proper  business  of  providing 
us  with  imaginative  pleasure,  it  is  already 
doing  the  work  of  the  theatre,  the  church,  the 

philosopher,  the   poet.     The   real  plays    that 

[94] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

thrill    us    with  their    human    drama    are    no 
longer  on  the  stage,  but  in  the  pages  of  our 


3* 


novels;  and,  when  a  writer  wishes  to  discuss 
a  spiritual  and  moral  problem  through  the  >->->  &£., 
medium  by  which  he  may  best  reach  the 
audience  concerned,  he  chooses  the  novel. 
From  the  beginning,  mankind  has  been  best 
pleased  to  be  taught  in  parables,  but  the  para- 
ble has  never  before  been  so  inclusive  and  so 
authoritative  a  vehicle  as  it  is  in  our  time. 

The  novel,  therefore,  becomes,  more  and 
more,  an  index  of  the  life  of  mankind,  and  an 
introduction  to  general  culture.  At  the  same 
time,  while  it  may  provide  us  with  vivid  illus- 
trations of  history,  it  can  never  take  the  place 
of  real  history,  any  more  than,  however  it  may 
appeal  to  that  sense  of  romance  and  beauty 
which  is  so  much  of  poetry,  it  can  take  the 

place  of  poetry.     Just  so  an  organ  combines  all 

[95] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

instruments,  yet  it  can  never  be  a  substitute  for 
the  violin.  As  an  introduction,  however,  to 
the  pleasant  gardens  of  knowledge,  I  repeat 
that  the  novel  is  of  inestimable  value.  It  is 
the  laughing  decoy  of  literature.  An  unread 
man  has  only  to  read  a  very  few  of  the  great 
representative  novels  to  find  where  he  stands, 
what  his  tastes  are  likely  to  be,  and  what  it  is 
that  he  is  looking  for  in  books.  If  his  temper- 
ament is  for  what  Theophile  Gautier  called 
"the  drab"  in  human  life,  the  exact,  untrans- 
figured  picture  of  human  existence,  unrain- 
bowcd  by  romance,  unsanctified  by  emotion, 
it  will  evidently  not  be  to  poetry  that  the  novel 
will  lead  him.  If  the  bent  of  his  mind  is  philo- 
sophical, the  philosophical  novel  will  send  him 
to  the  fountain-head  of  the  great  philosophers, 
as  the  make-believe  of  the  historical  novel  will 
send  him  to  the  pages  of  history. 

[96] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

Perhaps,  of  all  studies,  the  study  of  the  first 
importance  to  an  average  citizen  is  the  study 
of  history.  The  reading  of  history  is  a  sort  of 
mental  travel.  Just  as  a  man  who  has  seen  no 
other  country  but  his  own  is  apt  to  be  provincial 
in  his  ideas,  unintelligently  patriotic  and  intol- 
erant of  "the  foreigner"  he  has  never  met, 
so  the  man  who  knows  no  history  is  limited  in 
his  perspective,  and  comprehends  as  little  the 
meaning  of  the  contemporary  history  forming 
every  moment  around  him  as  a  peasant  does 
the  issue  of  a  presidential  election.  We  read 
history,  not  so  much  to  be  informed  about  the 
past,  as  to  understand  the  present.  We  will, 
of  course,  begin  with  the  history  of  our  own 
nation,  and  we  shall  have  gone  but  a  little  way 
in  that  without  coming  to  see  how  that  study 
necessitates  our  reading  the  history  of  other 
nations,  so  complex  is  the  process  of  historic 

[97] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

evolution;  so  indissolubly  related  is  one  nation 
to  another  in  spite  of  international  jealousies 
and  cruel  wars!  Our  national  pride  may  not 
be  abated  by  this  survey,  but  it  will  be  the  more 
intelligently  supported,  and  we  shall  have  come 
to  realize  at  least  that,  though  we  are  undoubt- 
edly the  greatest  nation  on  the  earth,  we  are 
not  the  only  one. 

Apart  from  this  general  gain  in  mental  ex- 
pansiveness,  into  what  fascinating  byways  of 
human  experience  will  the  study  of  history  lead 
one !  So  much  has  been  done  in  this  world,  so 
many  lives  so  richly  and  bravely  lived,  that  we 
know  nothing  of,  until  we  take  up  some  old 
history  and  find  a  mere  name  turning  to  a  living 
man  or  woman,  working,  loving,  fighting,  just 
as  we,  maybe,  are  doing;  and  the  spectacle 
brings  one  a  curious  inspiration  and  comfort, 

while  it  deepens  and  broadens  our  humanity 

[93] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

as  no  other  study  can  so  well  do  as  the  study  of 
history. 

Perhaps  the  best  way  to  read  history  is  to 
take  up  the  life  of  some  figure  that  attracts  our 
imagination,  and  be  drawn  by  that  into  the 
study  of  the  general  stage  upon  which  he  was 
only  a  single  actor.  Certainly  it  is  not  a  good 
plan  to  begin  with  those  elaborate  documen- 
tary histories  in  which  you  cannot  see  the  wood 
for  the  trees.  It  is  better  to  be  wrong  in  a  few 
of  your  facts,  or  even  contract  a  bias  from  some 
partisan  historian,  than  to  lose  yourself  in  a 
morass  of  documents.  The  best  histories  are  the 
vividest.  If  they  occasionally  lead  you  astray, 
you  can  always  correct  them  by  the  more 
sober-coloured  chronicles.  Macaulay  may 
have  been  prejudiced,  and  so  may  Froude,  and 
so,  undoubtedly,  was  Carlyle;  so,  again,  was 

Gibbon;  yet,  none  the  less,  these  are  the  great 

[99] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

historians,  the  historians  who  set  you  upon  the 
peaks  of  time,  and  enable  you  to  see  history  as 
it  lies  beneath  in  wide  views  and  broad  masses. 
Philosophy  and  science  are  the  two  branches 
of  study,  perhaps,  next  in  importance  for  the 
average  reader;  man's  progressive  interpreta- 
tion of  his  own  soul,  and  his  latest  discoveries 
in,  and  guesses  at,  the  nature  of  the  mysterious 
universe  in  which  he  finds  himself.  Here, 
again,  the  unread  man  will  be  wise  not  to 
weary  and  bewilder  himself  with  first-hand 
technical  authorities,  —  unless,  of  course,  he 
means  to  become  a  technical  student  of  phil- 
osophy or  of  science.  For  example,  Spinoza 
has  had,  perhaps,  the  greatest  of  all  influences 
on  modern  thought,  yet  the  "  Ethics  "  is  incom- 
prehensible to  anyone  not  specially  trained  in 
philosophical  study.     All  most  of  us  need  to 

understand  Spinoza  is  Frederick  Pollock's  ad- 

[100] 


What  an  Unread  Man  should  Read 

mirable  study,  and  that  will  be  found  suffi- 
ciently to  tax  the  attention. 

Similarly,  in  regard  to  science,  such  books 
as  Darwin's  "  Origin  of  Species  "  are  written 
for  scientists,  not  for  the  general  reader  ;  and 
their  results  are  to  be  found  in  many  easily  ac- 
cessible handbooks.  In  science,  at  least,  the 
middleman,  the  lucid  expositor  of  abstruse  sub- 
jects, is  more  than  justified,  and,  happily,  there 
are  many  such  in  every  branch  of  science. 

On  poetry  it  seems  particularly  vain  to  offer 
advice.  The  lover  of  poetry  is  born  no  less 
than  the  poet,  and,  I  fear,  he  cannot  be  made. 
An  unread  man  is  apt  to  be  cynical  about  the 
uses  of  poetry.  To  him  it  seems  a  frippery,  a 
rather  effeminate  ornament  of  life;  instead  of 
being,  as,  of  course,  it  actually  is,  the  fine  flower 
of  its  vital  essence.  An  unread  man  has,  it  is 
true,  much  good  reason  for  his  view,  for  verse 

[101] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

has  too  often  been  made  a  mere  toy  of,  and 
may  well  seem  to  him  a  sugary  medium  for 
silly  sentiment.  He's  wrong,  of  course,  but 
how  can  we  convince  him  ?  Here,  indeed, 
there  is  only  one  way  —  the  best.  He  must 
read  the  best  poetry — no  second  best  will  do. 
He  needn't  begin  with  Dante,  or  even  Shake- 
speare; but  let  him  try  Burns,  or  Hood,  or  Kip- 
ling, —  poets  who  talk  the  familiar  speech  of 
men,  and  not  the  more  hieratic  speech  of  the 
muse.  If  he  enjoys  them,  he  may  come  to 
enjoy  their  greater  fellows,  and  other  kinds  of 
poetry.  But,  as  you  may  bring  the  horse  to 
the  water,  et  ccetera,  so  it  is  with  the  man  who 
is  not  born  to  love  poetry.  Poetry  is  the  one 
thing  you  have  to  find  out  for  yourself,  and,  if 
you  really  want  it,  you  always  find  it. 


[102] 


HOW    TO    FORM    A 
LIBRARY 


What  are  my  books?     My  friends,  my  loves, 
My  church,  my  tavern  and  my  only  wealth  ; 
My  garden — yea,    my   flowers,  my    bees,    my 
doves  ; 
My  only  doctors  —  and  my  only  health. 

Richard  Le  Gallienne. 


"  And  if  it  were  so  that  I  must  be  a  Pris- 
oner, if  I  might  have  my  wish,  I  would  desire 
to  have  no  other  prison  than  that  library  [the 
Bodleian],  and  to  be  chained  together  with  so 
many  good  authors." 

James    I,  quoted    in   Burton's   Anatomy   of 
Melancholy. 


THERE  are  many  readers  who  do  not 
feel  the  need  of  possessing  books  for 

themselves.     A  subscription  to  a  good 
lending  library  serves  their  purpose,  and  often 

the  most  omnivorous  and  intelligent  readers 

belong  to  this  class.     When  once  they  have 

mastered  the  contents  of  a  book,  or  exhausted 

its  entertainment,  they  have  no  further  need  of 

it.     It  is  to  them  so  much  oyster  shell;  and 

this,  too,  is  their  way  not  only  with  books  of 

the  passing  hour,  few  of  which  seem  intended 

for  permanent  possession,  but  also  with  the 

classics    and    familiars    of    literature.     They 

don't    feel    the   need    of    possessing    even    a 

Shakespeare,  and  one  can  easily  imagine  their 

[105] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

reading  the  Bible  in  a  lending  library  copy: 
'Three  weeks  allowed  for  reading  this 
book."  Some  readers,  I  say,  are  born  this 
way.  One  might  describe  them  as  deficient 
in  the  home-sense  as  applied  to  books,  perhaps 
deficient,  too,  in  the  quality  of  friendship. 
For  to  another  class  of  readers  it  seems  in- 
deed that  some  books  are  only  to  be  made 
really  one's  own  on  a  friends-for-life  basis,  and 
on  condition  of  their  being  housed  and  domesti- 
cated with  us.  You  cannot  really  read  Milton 
in  a  borrowed  copy,  or  enjoy  the  exquisite  com- 
panionship of  Charles  Lamb  in  the  spirit  of  a 
quick  lunch.  As  you  have  to  live  with  people 
to  know  them,  so  you  have  to  live  with  the  real 
books,  —  at  least  some  readers  have,  the  read- 
ers I  have  in  mind  as  I  write. 

One  is  sometimes  asked,  by  young  readers, 
how  best  to  set  about  the  formation  of  a  library. 

[106] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

As  a  matter  of  fact,  I  think  the  born  book-lover 
finds  that  a  library  has  a  way  of  beginning 
itself,  and  that,  looking  back,  he  can  hardly 
recall  how  his  library  began,  or  remember  a 
time  when  a  certain  number  of  books  was  not, 
so  to  speak,  a  part  of  his  natural  outfit.  But 
actually,  of  course,  a  library,  like  all  other 
human  things,  must  have  a  beginning  some- 
where. Unless  we  order  our  books  by  the 
yard,  or  buy  a  library  ready-made  from  a  book- 
seller, there  must  be  the  first  book,  —  the  one 
that  is  to  prove  the  foundation  stone  of  the 
house  of  books  we  propose  to  build  for  our- 
selves. The  first  book  we  bought!  I  wonder 
how  many  of  us  can  remember  it.  And  our 
first  modest  bookshelf !  What  important  things 
they  were,  and  how  genuinely  interesting! 
Not  unlikely  our  first  books  were  gifts  from 
friends,  —  and  there,  by  the  way,  is  one  good 

[107] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

method  of  beginning  a  library.  Let  your 
present-bearing  friends  know  about  your  taste 
for  books,  and,  when  they  show  a  disposition 
to  make  you  a  present,  gently  hint  that  you 
would  like  to  take  it  in  the  form  of  a  book,  — 
but  be  careful,  if  possible,  to  choose  your  book! 
For  there  is  no  Dead  Sea  fruit  more  bitter  than 
the  gift-book  that  you  can  not  read,  and  that  it 
hurts  you  to  place  on  your  shelf,  a  meaningless 
intruder.  In  this  way,  one  can  sometimes  ac- 
quire a  treasure  for  one's  little  library  otherwise 
out  of  the  reach  of  one's  slender  means,  —  for  it 
seems  to  be  a  law  of  nature  that  most  book- 
lovers  are  poor  people.  This  being  admitted 
as  an  axiom  with  which  to  start,  it  is  of  impor- 
tance that  the  would-be  library-builder  wastes 
as  little  as  possible  of  his  available  cash  on 
mere   experiment.     He   needs   to   be   certain, 

before  he  buys  a  book,  that  he  will  want  to 

[108] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

keep  it.  Here  he  will  find  the  lending  library 
an  invaluable  aid  to  him.  By  means  of  its 
catalogues  and  privileges  he  may  prospect  the 
entire  world  of  books,  new  and  old,  and  care- 
fully sample  any  he  is  prompted  to  buy,  before 
actually  making  his  purchase;  for  it  may  well 
happen  that  certain  great  books  of  the  world, 
which  he  might  be  tempted  to  buy  offhand  on 
their  fame  value,  will  prove  of  no  service  or 
appeal  to  him.  Lists  of  the  best  hundred 
books  are  apt  to  be  misleading  in  this  way. 
They  usually,  for  example,  include  Confucius: 

—  yet,  great  teacher  as  he  was,  I  don't  believe 
you  want  to  buy  his  writings;  though,  of  course, 
you  may.  There  is  the  difficulty  of  advice; 
and  that  is  why,  again,  it  is  dangerous  to  buy 
books  offhand  on  the  recommendation  of  a 
friend.     The  library  is  going  to  be  your  library, 

—  and  no  one  else's,  —  and  it  is  to  be  so  se- 

[109] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

lected  as  sensitively  to  reflect  your  own  personal 
tastes  and  needs,  and  no  one  else's. 

Again,  it  must  be  understood  that  a  living 
library  is  not  to  be  deliberately  made.  It 
grows.  You  cannot  plan  it  out  on  paper  and 
then  buy  it  en  bloc.  Of  course,  you  can  make 
a  collection  of  books  in  that  way,  but  a  collec- 
tion of  books  is  not  a  library.  A  bookstore  is 
a  collection  of  books,  but  it  is  not  a  library.  A 
library  is  an  organism,  developing  side  by  side 
with  the  mind  and  character  of  its  owner.  It 
is  the  house  of  his  spirit,  and  is  thus  furnished 
progressively  in  accordance  with  the  progress 
of  his  mental  life. 

Then,  one  book  naturally  leads  to  another 

by  unforeseen  laws  or  accidents  of  association. 

We  will  suppose,  for  example,  that  you  have 

decided   to   begin   your  library   with   Lamb's 

"Essays   of   Elia,"   and   I   cannot   imagine   a 

[110] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

library  better  begun.  Supposing,  too,  that  you 
find  Lamb  the  sympathetic,  friendly  writer 
most  properly  constituted  readers  have  found 
him,  you  will  not  have  gone  far  before  you  will 
find  him  awakening  your  curiosity  about  cer- 
tain book-cronies  of  his,  and  you  will  probably 
be  inquiring  at  your  lending  library  for  Sir 
Thomas  Browne's  "Religio  Medici,"  or  Sir 
Philip  Sidney's  "Sonnets,"  or  Izaak  Walton's 
"Compleat  Angler,"  and  I  should  be  surprised 
if  your  reading  of  Lamb  did  not  end  in  your 
adding  those  three  rarely  delightful  writers  to 
your  bookshelf.  While  you  would  probably 
not  follow  Lamb  in  all  his  bookish  whims,  and 
would  find  that  you  have  no  use  for  his  "  Mar- 
garet, Duchess  of  Newcastle,"  or  even  Burton's 
1  "Anatomy  of  Melancholy,"  still,  it  would  be 
strange  if  his  passion  for  the  old  Elizabethan  dra- 
matists did  not  lead  you  to  look  up  Marlowe  and 

[111] 

IMA  **f 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Webster  and  Ford  and  Dekker  for  yourself. 
There,  at  a  bound,  you  are  knee-deep  in  the 
flowery  meadows  of  Shakespeare  and  his  con- 
temporaries. You  might  well  decide,  with 
many  good  judges,  that  Lamb,  in  the  ardour  of 
discovery,  overestimated  the  secondary  and 
lesser  Elizabethans.  You  might  find  that  they 
do  not  appeal  to  you  at  all,  or  only  here  and  there. 
In  the  latter  case,  Lamb,  himself,  has  antici- 
pated your  need,  by  his  finely  selected  "  Speci- 
mens," one  of  the  masterpieces  of  critical  an- 
thology which  might  well  find  a  place  on  your 
shelf.  Lamb,  too,  would  naturally  introduce 
you  to  his  own  contemporary  intimates,  and 
you  could  not  read  him  and  miss  wanting  to 
know  more  about  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge 
and  Hazlitt.  So  one  real  book  is  vitally  re- 
lated to  the  cosmos  of  literature,  and  spreads 

its  roots  about  the  whole  globe  of  knowledge, 

[112] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

and  its  branches  into  the  farthest  heaven  of 
art. 

Perhaps,  indeed,  the  briefest  formula  of  ad- 
vice to  those  about  to  form  a  library  would  be : 
begin  with  a  copy  of  Lamb's  "Essays  of  Elia," 
and  then  await  developments.  Of  course,  it 
might  happen  that  Lamb's  charm  is  not  for 
you.  Then  you  must  begin  somewhere  else. 
I  might  almost  say,  begin  anywhere.  You 
might,  for  instance,  begin  with  perhaps  the 
most  fascinating  history  ever  written,  —  John 
Richard  Green's  "  Short  History  of  the  English 
People."  There  is  a  book  with  roots  and 
branches,  if  you  like !  It  is  a  book  that  would 
probably  attract  more  companions  on  your 
shelf  than  any  other  book  I  could  name,  and 
books,  too,  of  the  most  comprehensive  diversity : 
historians,  philosophers,  politicians,  poets, 
dramatists,    and    novelists,  —  every    kind    of 

[113] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

writer  that  has  illustrated  the  various  life  of 
man.     Or  still  another  excellent  germinal  book 
would    be    Macaulay's    "Essays."     Superior 
persons  may  tell  you  that  Macaulay  is  played 
out.    Don't  you  believe  them.    Read  the  essays 
for  yourself,  and  you  will  see.     There  is  still  no 
more  live  book  of  its  kind  in  English.     You 
may  need  to  correct  his  facts  by  other  histo- 
rians.    Curiously    enough,    it    is    always    the 
great  historians  that  need  to  have  their  facts 
corrected.     It  is  the  little  historians  that  are 
always  accurate,  —  the  truth  being  that  it  is 
the  spirit  of  history  that  matters,  not  the  small 
details.     The  facts  of  history,  by  the  very  na- 
ture of  evidence,  can  never  be  absolutely  accu- 
rate.    It  is  the  imaginative   presentation  and 
interpretation  of  facts  that  we  ask  from  a  his- 
torian.    Therefore,  I  say,  read  Macaulay  and 
Carlyle   and   Froude.     You   might   do   worse 

[114] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

than  start  your  library  with  Froude's  "Lec- 
tures on  the  Life  and  Times  of  Erasmus,"  — 
another  book  with  windows  open  on  every 
side  to  the  infinity  of  human  life  and  human 
history. 

Assuming  that,  in  one  way  or  another,  you 
have  made  a  start  with  your  library,  one  ques- 
tion will  very  soon  arise  for  your  decision:  are 
your  authors  to  be  represented  in  their  com- 
pleteness, in  the  monumental  entirety  of  "sets," 
and,  if  not,  how  far  are  you  going  to  rest  satis- 
fied, or  may  you  venture  to  rest  satisfied,  with 
"selections"?  This  is  a  question  into  which, 
obviously,  material,  as  well  as  literary,  condi- 
tions must  enter.  How  much  money  have  you 
to  spend  on  books?  How  much  room  have 
you  for  storing  them  ?  Old  fourteenth-century 
Richard  de  Bury,  in  his  delightful  treatise  on 
the  love  of  books,  the  "Philobiblon,"  has  a 

[115] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

chapter  on  "What  We  Are  to  Think  of  the 
Price  in  the  Buying  of  Books."  In  this  he 
declares  "that  no  clearness  of  price  ought  to 
hinder  a  man  from  the  buying  of  books,"  but  he 
adds,  with  something  of  anti-climax,  —  "  if  he 
has  the  money  that  is  demanded  for  them!" 
Ah,  there's  the  rub.  Unfortunately,  "the 
money  that  is  demanded  for  them"  is  quite  a 
consideration;  and,  as  the  great  writers  are 
usually  the  most  voluminous,  their  "collected 
works  "  not  only  cost  money,  but  they  take  up 
a  great  deal  of  room.  If  you  want  a  complete 
Carlyle,  a  complete  Dickens,  a  complete 
Thackeray,  —  you  are  well  on  to  a  hundred 
volumes  before  you  know  where  you  are.  Of 
course,  if  you've  the  money  and  the  room  for 
them,  you  will  be  unwillingly  content  with  less 
than  their  complete  achievement.  Yet  it  has 
often  happened  with  great  writers,  one  might 

[116] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

almost  say  it  has  usually  happened,  that  from 
the  mass  of  their  entire  product  there  stands 
out  one  or  two  books  which  concentrate  all  the 
rest,  and  which,  in  a  library  restricted  in  size, 
may  suffice  to  represent  their  writers.  Take 
Carlyle,  for  example.  If  you  have  three  of  his 
books  on  your  shelves,  you  practically  have 
Carlyle.  I  mean,  if  you  have  "Sartor  Resar- 
tus,"  "Heroes,"  and  "The  French  Revolu- 
tion." Of  course,  it's  a  pity  to  miss  the  rest, 
and,  perhaps,  in  any  case,  we  should  say  four, 
and  include  "Past  and  Present."  Also,  one 
cannot  claim  to  know  Carlyle,  in  the  whole  of 
his  contradictory  nature,  without  reading  his 
"  Latter-Day  Pamphlets. "  But  these,  and  other 
books  of  his,  we  can  read  in  a  library  copy,  — 
we  will  hardly  feel  the  need  of  possessing  them. 
Another  great  prose-writer  will  lend  himself 
still  more  readily  to  selection,  —  De  Quincey. 

[117] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Boohs 

His  collected  works  run  to  some  sixteen 
closely  printed  volumes,  and  the  volumes  are 
all  packed,  more  or  less,  with  good  reading; 
but  all  that  really  counts  in  De  Quincey  is 
'The  Confessions  of  an  Opium-Eater"  and  a 
few  related  papers  of  reminiscence,  easily  con- 
tained  in   one   volume. 

The  great  novelists  present  greater  diffi- 
culties, for  most  of  them  have  written  so 
many  books,  each  one  of  which  may  be  re- 
garded as  typical,  that  a  selection  must  be 
more  or  less  arbitrary.  Yet,  such  is  their 
voluminousness  that  the  inclusion  of  them 
complete  in  a  small  library  is  impossible;  and 
there  is  nothing  for  it  but  that  they  must  be 
present  in  the  form  of  one  or  two  representative 
volumes.  The  books  of  theirs  which  spring 
readily  to  the  memory,  as  being  those  by  which 
they  are  generally  known,  are  probably  those 

[118] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

which  are  the  most  vital  embodiment  of  their 
special  gifts,  —  but  one  has  only  to  name  such 
to  be  reminded  of  others  that  have  been  omit- 
ted. Yet  I  think  that  a  limit  of  three  books  will 
usually  allow  a  very  fair  representation  of  a 
novelist.  For  instance,  Thackeray  is  very 
fairly  represented  by  "Vanity  Fair,"  "Henry 
Esmond,"  and  "Pendennis";  and  Dickens  by 
"Pickwick,"  "David  Copperfield,"  and  "Mar- 
tin Chuzzlewit."  Walter  Scott  would  not  suf- 
fer by  one's  choosing  "  Ivanhoe,"  "  The  Bride  of 
Lammermoor,"  and  "The  Heart  of  Midlo- 
thian." "Tom  Jones"  would  suffice  for 
Fielding,  and  "Pride  and  Prejudice"  for  Jane 
Austen;  "The  Mill  on  the  Floss,"  for  George 
Eliot,  and  "The  Ordeal  of  Richard  Feverel," 
for  George  Meredith.  Taking  only  the  great 
outstanding  figures,  Tolstoi  need  only  be  pres- 
ent with  "Anna  Karenina"  and  "War  and 

[119] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Peace";  and  Emile  Zola  with,  say,  "Drink" 
and  "The  Dream."  "The  Three  Muske- 
teers" and  "The  Count  of  Monte-Cristo " 
would  suffice  for  Alexander  Dumas,  and  "  Les 
Miserables"  and  "Notre  Dame  de  Paris"  for 
Victor  Hugo.  It  is  harder  to  say  of  the  vast 
mountain  range  of  Balzac  on  what  particular 
peaks  our  choice  should  fall,  but  probably 
here,  again,  the  most  popular  books  will  prove 
the  most  typical,  —  "Le  Pere  Goriot,"  "Eu- 
genie Grandet,"  and  "The  Ass's  Skin." 

I  am  not,  it  must  be  understood,  making  any 
list  of  books  "without  which,"  as  the  book- 
sellers say,  "no  gentleman's  library  is  com- 
plete." I  am  only  taking  a  few  standard  au- 
thors, for  the  purpose  of  illustrating  a  principle 
of  selection  which  must  perforce  operate  in  a 
small  library.  The  reader's  temperament  may 
be  such  that  he  doesn't  feel  the  need  of  novels 

[120] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

in  his  library,  —  though,  as  the  novel  is  more 
and  more  absorbing  the  whole  domain  of  hu- 
man life  and  human  thought,  —  becoming,  so 
to  say,  the  comprehensive  Bon  Marche  of  liter- 
ature, —  it  is  no  longer  to  be  ignored  as  mere 
amusement  but  has  long  been  recognized  as  a 
serious  and  responsible,  as  well  as  entertaining, 
medium  of  expression.  But  each  one  to  his 
taste,  and  even  "Don  Quixote"  is  a  bore  to 
some  people.  Yet,  though  a  library,  as  I  said, 
must  be  a  personal  embodiment,  it  must,  at  the 
same  time,  to  deserve  the  name  at  all,  be  built 
with  some  regard  to  the  general  standards  of 
literary  importance,  standards  which  have  been 
evolved  out  of  the  experience  and  opinions  of 
generations  of  readers  of  the  most  varied  tastes 
and  temperaments.  Time  is  continually  ap- 
plying these  standards  over  and  over  again, 
and  it  is  seldom,  if  ever,  that  it  reverses  a  long- 

[121] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Boohs 

established  judgment.  Therefore,  if  our  li- 
brary does  not,  or  can  not,  contain  all  the  best 
books,  it  must  certainly  contain  some  of  them; 
and,  however  idiosyncratic  of  its  owner,  it  must 
bear  the  stamp  of  a  general  distinction.  A 
library,  say,  composed  entirely  of  the  ephemer- 
al literature  of  the  hour,  might  very  well  reflect 
the  preferences  of  the  owner,  but  it  would  be 
no  more  a  library  than  a  collection  of  old  time- 
tables or  directories  would  be  a  library.  A 
certain  fineness  of  mind  and  taste  is  presup- 
posed of  the  would-be  maker  of  a  library,  a 
certain  seriousness  of  nature  and  an  aspiration 
to  live  his  life  in  the  main  currents  of  human 
experience.  It  may  well  be  that  the  imagina- 
tive side  of  literature  does  not  appeal  to  him, 
but  rather  its  historical,  philosophical,  or  social 
aspects,  and  his  library  may  be  built  according 
to  these  predilections  and  yet  claim  to  be  some- 

[122] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

thing  more  than  a  technical  collection  of  books: 
—  for  the  literary  qualities  which  go  to  make  a 
classic  are  not  confined  to  the  poets  or  novelists. 
I  suppose  that  a  library  without  a  poet  might 
be  conceivable,  —  there  probably  are  such  li- 
braries, —  though  it  is  a  grim  thought,  and 
sounds  like  a  house  without  a  woman,  or  a  gar- 
den without  a  flower. 

Coming  to  the  poets  in  our  scheme,  they  are 
— from  the  library-maker's  point  of  view,  — 
much  more  manageable  than  the  novelists. 
Voluble  as  the  greatest  of  them  have  been,  it 
has  still  been  found  possible  to  print,  I  think, 
every  one  of  them  in  one-volume  editions,  — 
editions,  too,  on  good  paper  and  in  readable 
type.  Of  course,  it  is  preferable  to  read  them 
in  the  more  generous  editions,  and  this,  in  the 
case  of  the  few  poets  that  especially  appeal  to 
us,  it  ought  to  be  possible  for  us  to  do.     It  is  a 

[123] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

pity,  I  think,  to  read  Shakespeare  in  small 
type,  —  though  excellent  and  easily  readable 
small-type  editions  are  numerous.  One  should 
try  to  afford  the  luxury  of  that  little  pocket  edi- 
tion in  which  each  play  has  a  volume  to  itself, 
—  an  edition  edited  by  Mr.  Israel  Gollancz  and 
published  here  by  the  Macmillan  Company. 
This  is  not  only  the  most  comfortable  edition 
of  Shakespeare,  but  it  is  also  the  most  scholarly; 
though  Professor  Rolfe's  edition  published 
by  the  Baker  and  Taylor  Co.  is  hardly  less 
attractive  in  form,  and  is  deservedly  a  classic 
among  American  school  books.  As  Shake- 
speare is  of  such  immense  importance  to  us, 
such  a  generous  representation  of  him  in  our 
little  library  is  rather  just  than  extravagant. 
Dante  and  Goethe  are  to  be  had  in  readable 
single  volumes,  and  Milton  and  Keats  easily 

lend  themselves  to  a  generous  one-volume  form. 

[124] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

Even  Wordsworth  and  Shelley  and  Coleridge 
are  to  be  had  in  well-edited  and  comely  one- 
volume  editions.  Byron  is  rather  cramped  in 
one  volume,  but  the  whole  of  Browning  has 
been  packed  into  two  volumes  luxurious  enough 
for  any  library,  and  a  one-volume  Tennyson 
has  been  a  familiar  of  the  bookshelves  for  many 
years.  Chaucer  and  Spenser  need  more  room 
to  be  read  with  comfort,  though  the  Macmillan 
Company's  "Globe"  edition  of  Spenser  is 
handy  and  scholarly,  and  the  same  firm  pub- 
lishes an  excellent  two-volume  selection  from 
Chaucer,  edited  by  Mr.  A.  W.  Pollard.  The 
Macmillan  Company  also  publishes  one-volume 
editions  of  all  the  other  poets  I  have  named, 
with  the  exception  of  Byron;  editions  which, 
both  as  regards  editing  and  format,  are  among 
the  best  in  the  market. 

The  mention  of  Mr.  Pollard's  "Chaucer" 

[125] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

raises  the  question  as  to  how  far  selections  and 
anthologies  are  useful  in  a  library.  The  exist- 
ence of  such  good  one-volume  complete  poets 
as  I  have  named  makes  it  a  question  of  less  im- 
portance than  it  once  was,  —  for  when  one's 
author,  complete,  takes  up  no  more  room,  and 
costs  no  more  than  a  selection  from  him,  there 
is  little  point  in  buying  the  selection.  Besides, 
however  skilfully  made  a  selection  may  be,  one 
can  never  be  sure  that  the  editor  has  not  omitted 
the  very  thing  that  had  a  special  appeal  for  us. 
Yet  there  are  some  poets  in  whom  the  slag  and 
waste  products  are  so  considerable,  that  one 
is  thankful  when  some  competent  authority 
separates  the  precious  metal  into  one  small 
shining  volume.  This  is  the  case  with  Words- 
worth, and  very  much  so  with  Coleridge.  I 
fancy  that  there  is  little  of  Wordsworth  outside 

Matthew  Arnold's  selection  that  we  care  to 

[12G] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

go  back  to,  —  except  "The  Prelude."  Most 
readers,  nowadays,  agree  with  Byron  about 
"The  Excursion,"  but  it  is  to  be  feared  that 
Byron's  own  long  poems,  with  the  exception 
of  "Don  Juan,"  seem  no  less  heavy  reading 
to-day. 

Byron,  too,  will  bear  selection.  As  for  Cole- 
ridge, a  very  few  pages  are  all  that  endure  of  all 
his  rainbow  volubility;  but  what  pages !  Again, 
Shelley  and  Browning  are  safely  read  in  good 
selections.  Then,  too,  not  a  few  of  the  older 
poets,  while,  for  individual  readers,  they  may 
have  such  special  appeal  as  to  be  valuable 
throughout,  grow  to  have  little  meaning  for  the 
general  lover  of  literature  to-day.  One  might 
almost  say  this  of  the  eighteenth  century  poets 
en  masse,  without,  for  an  instant,  denying  the 
importance  of  Dryden  and  Pope,  for  example. 

Dryden  and  Pope  are  undoubtedly  great  poets, 

[127] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  oj  Books 

but  they  are  great  in  a  way  alien  to  the  imagi- 
native and  spiritual  needs  of  the  present  age. 
The  poets  of  the  two  centuries  preceding  them 
are  far  nearer  to  our  time,  simply  because 
their  inspiration  was  more  universal,  and  closer 
to  the  natural  heart  of  man.  Chaucer  is  infi- 
nitely nearer  to  us  than  Pope,  because  of  his 
deeper  and  more  general  humanity,  and  such 
real  poets,  great  or  small,  —  poets  that  voice 
the  enduring  feelings  of  mankind,  —  are  always 
contemporary.  Thus  the  cavalier  poet  Love- 
lace, with  his  one  lyric,  "  Stone  Walls  do  not  a 
Prison  Make,"  in  the  end  outweighs,  in  lasting 
importance,  all  the  glittering  achievement  of  a 
Pope. 

The  case  of  Lovelace  may  serve  to  illustrate 
the  place  of  anthologies  on  one's  shelves.  You 
can  buy  a  complete  Lovelace,  if  you  wish  for 
it,  but,  unless  you  have  a  collector's  or  a  his- 

[128] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

torian's  interest  in  him,  it  will  give  you  little 
further  satisfaction.     The  same  applies  to  Sir 
John  Suckling,  with  his  delightful  "Ballad  of 
a  Wedding,"  and  even  such  exquisite  lyrists  as 
Herrick  and  Campion  grow  laborious  in  com- 
plete editions.     Here  the  anthologist  of  taste 
and  judgment  is  an  invaluable  friend,  and,  in 
one  or  two  cases,  he  has  done  his  work  so  well 
as  to  make  an  anthology  that  has,  in  its  turn, 
become  something  like  a  masterpiece  in  itself. 
The  model  of  all  such  anthologies  is,  of  course, 
Palgrave's    "Golden    Treasury"    of    English 
lyrics,  —  a  classic  garland  which  is,  perhaps, 
the  one  book  you  may  be  sure  of  finding  on  any 
bookshelf.     A  companion  classic  of  selection, 
in  which  an  equally  fine  taste  has  done  the  same 
service  to  lovers  of  the  French  lyric,  is  Gustave 
Masson's  "La  Lyre  Franqaise." 

The  anthologist  illustrates  the  value  of  the 

[129] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

critic  in  one's  library,  and  that  value  is  very 
great,  both  for  the  services  of  guidance  and 
of  entertainment.  To  some  tastes  there  is  no 
form  of  literature  more  stimulating  and  de- 
lightful than  that  of  those  critical  essays  in 
which  some  persuasive  student  of  books  in- 
terprets a  masterpiece,  or  unfolds  his  own 
preferences.  Taine's  "History  of  English 
Literature"  remains  one  of  the  most  vivid  and 
most  useful  books  of  this  class ;  while  Matthew 
Arnold's  "Essays  in  Criticism"  and  Leslie 
Stephens's  "Hours  in  a  Library"  will  not  only 
give  the  reader  rare  pleasure  in  themselves, 
but  materially  assist  him  in  discovering  his 
own  tastes,  —  a  discovery  which  is  by  no  means 
made  all  at  once.  The  " causcries"  of  the 
great  French  critic,  Sainte-Beuve,  partially 
translated,  are,  of  course,  classics  of  this  kind; 
and  the  writings  of  George  Brandcs,  the  great 

[130] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

Danish  critic,  slowly  becoming  accessible  to 
English  readers,  are  illustrative  criticism  of 
the  most  vital  and  picturesque  kind.  As  I 
conclude  this  paper,  I  note  that  Messrs.  Har- 
per and  Brothers  are  putting  on  the  market 
an  English  series  of  critical  biographies  which 
has  deservedly  attained  great  distinction,  and 
is  of  its  kind  without  rival;  viz.,  the  well-known 
"  English  Men  of  Letters  "  series,  edited  by  Mr. 
John  Morley.  Each  volume  is  a  biographical- 
critical  study  of  some  great  English  writer, 
written  by  a  critic  of  authority,  and  often  of 
distinction.  Such  men  as  Froude,  Huxley, 
Trollope,  Goldwin  Smith,  Austin  Dobson, 
J.  A.  Symonds,  Mark  Pattison,  and  Sidney  Col- 
vin  are  among  the  critics,  and  most  of  the  great 
English  writers  of  various  kinds  are  dealt  with. 
Having  been  brought  up  largely  on  this  excel- 
lent and  delightful  series,  I  am  glad  to  see  it 

[131] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

coming  over  to  America,  and,  as  the  volumes 
are  small  and  cheap  as  well  as  good,  I  do  not 
think  that  the  reader  I  have  had  in  mind  in 
writing  this  article  could  cover  three  feet  of  his 
shelves  more  profitably,  or  make  a  twenty-five- 
dollar  book  investment  to  better  advantage. 
Messrs.  Harper  and  Brothers  offer  the  set  on 
the  installment  plan,  —  a  modern  plan  which 
considerably  facilitates  the  building  of  a  poor 
man's  library.  Too  often,  however,  the  books 
thus  offered  for  sale  are  expensive  sets  of  one 
particular  author,  which  one  cannot  afford,  or 
does  not  desire  to  have  so  elaborately  repre- 
sented. Here,  however,  is  a  set  which  is  a 
varied  library  in  itself,  a  complete  body  of 
English  literary  history  and  criticism. 

And,   talking   of   biography,   which   I  have 
tacitly   included   with   history   in   this   article, 

another  excellent  way  to  start  your  library  is  to 

[132] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

begin  with  a  good  biography.  Take  Bos  well's 
"Life  of  Johnson,"  for  instance;  or,  if  you 
prefer  a  world  nearer  our  own  time,  with  more 
of  our  modern  atmosphere,  try  G.  H.  Lewes 's 
"Life  and  Works  of  Goethe."  Here  are  two 
books,  indeed,  which  are  like  great  railway 
termini,  from  which  one  may  start  out  on  any 
journey  and  arrive,  far-travelled,  at  the  remot- 
est destination ;  for  a  real  book  is  the  one  road 
to  everywhere. 

P.  S.  If  it  be  objected  that  in  considering 
the  formation  of  a  library  I  have  said  nothing 
specifically  concerning  American  literature,  I 
would  answer  that  it  is  surely  from  no  lack  of 
regard  for  and  delight  in  that  literature,  but 
merely  because  I  have  been  writing  in  general 
terms,  and  because  American  literature  is  only 
one  part  of  perhaps  the  greatest  of  European 
literatures,  —  English  literature.     But  the  im- 

[133] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

portance  and  significance  of  America's  con- 
tribution to  English  literature  has,  perhaps, 
hardly  been  sufficiently  acknowledged.  It  is 
great  indeed,  and  it  is  but  fair  to  say  that  the 
great  American  writers  have  received  at  least 
as  ample  and  as  ardent  an  appreciation  in 
England  as  in  their  own  country.  To  this 
day,  I  would  venture  to  describe  Longfellow 
as  the  most  popular  of  English  poets,  while 
England  has  certainly  been  ahead  of  America 
in  her  hospitality  to  Poe  and  Whitman  —  as, 
by  a  return  of  courtesies,  America  has  occa- 
sionally done  the  like  by  English  authors  neg- 
lected in  their  own  land.  I  always  like  to 
think  that  the  first  collected  edition  of  De 
Quincey  was  published  in  Boston.  It  seems 
to  me  that  when  I  was  young,  we  read  more 
American  authors  than  British,  and  I  am  sure 

that    Emerson    and    Thoreau    and    Whitman 

[134] 


How  to  Form  a  Library 

meant  more  to  us  than  any  British  writer  ex- 
cept Carlyle.  As  schoolboy  reading,  Fenimore 
Cooper  ran  Captain  Marryat  very  close,  and 
I  recall  several  youthful  libraries  that  made  a 
point  of  elaborate  sets  of  Hawthorne  and  Oliver 
Wendell  Holmes.  In  selecting  his  American 
books  the  library-builder  will,  of  course,  pro- 
ceed as  in  the  case  of  any  other  literature,  and 
follow  the  line  of  his  natural  needs.  Whitman 
is  not  everybody's  poet,  neither  is  Poe  — 
neither,  as  I  said  before,  is  Homer!  In  litera- 
ture as  elsewhere  the  proverb  holds  that  you 
may  take  the  horse  to  the  water,  but  you  cannot 
make  him  drink  —  nor  in  this  case  is  there  any 
necessity  to  make  him.  Let  us  read  just  what 
we  want  to  read  in  American  literature  as  else- 
where, always,  of  course,  having  a  good  try  at 
the  best  first  —  for  we  must  never  forget  that 
there  is  a  best,  whatever  our  individual  tastes 

[135] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

may  be;  and  a  library  that  should  lack  such 
American  writers  as  I  have  named,  and  others 
one  could  name,  would  seem  lonely  to  most  of 
us,  besides  being  seriously  incomplete. 


[136] 


THE    NOVEL    AND 
NOVELISTS     OF    TO-DAY 


"  Only  young  ladies  from  the  boarding- 
school,  or  milliners*  girls  read  all  the  new 
novels  that  come  out." 

William  Hazlitt. 


VI 

A  SHORT  while  ago  I  saw  that  someone 
had  been  writing  on  "The  Decadence 
of  the  Novel,"  —  I  think  it  was  that 
brilliant  young  novelist,  Benjamin  Swift.  Well, 
I  don't  know !  Is  the  novel,  when  you  come  to 
think  of  it,  in  quite  such  a  bad  way  ?  At  the 
first  flush,  all  contemporary  pessimism  is  apt 
to  find  a  ready  acquiescence.  It  has  the  per- 
manent discontent  of  human  nature  back  of  it. 
The  sound  of  the  great  old  men  departing 
deadens  our  ears  to  the  sound  of  the  great 
young  men  arriving.  No  contemporary  ever 
plays  Hamlet  like  Kean.  "And  yet — ,  and 
yet — ,"  says  Stephen  Phillips,  himself  a  poet 
whose  shoulders   are   rapidly  broadening  for 

[139] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

one  of  the  old  mantles.  Yes!  Dickens  and 
Thackeray  are  dead,  it  is  true ;  and  Balzac  and 
Dumas  no  longer  throw  their  vast  shadows 
across  the  world;  and  yet,  —  well,  let  us  for  a 
little  count  our  mercies  in  the  shape  of  living 
novelists,  and  see  if  our  day  of  small  things  is 
so  diminutive,  after  all. 

Have  we  any  great  novelists,  properly  so 
called?  I  do  not  mean  merely  able,  brilliant 
novelists,  —  but  novelists  really  great;  the 
quality  of  greatness,  perhaps  we  may  premise, 
being  an  indefinable  quality  of  the  man  himself 
bulking  large  behind  the  novelist. 

Yes;  we  have  Tolstoi,  and  Meredith,  and 
Bjornson. 

One  has  only  to  realize  what  these  three  men 
stand  for  to  realize  what  a  serious,  spiritual 
force  the  novel  has  become  in  the  modern 
world,  and  of  what  profound  and  delicate  hu- 

[140] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

man  interest  it  has  become  the  vehicle.  Tols- 
toi is  the  Christian;  Meredith,  the  philosopher; 
Bjornson,  the  patriot.  All  three  are  masterly 
story-tellers  and  creators  of  character.  We  read 
what  they  write  for  "the  story,"  like  the  work 
of  any  other  story-teller,  but  their  stories  move 
in  an  atmosphere  so  charged  with  the  deepest 
meanings  of  life  that  they  have  the  significance 
of  veritable  history,  and  the  authority  of  spirit- 
ual messages.  These  men  have  been  teachers 
of  their  time  with  an  influence  far  beyond  that 
of  the  professed  religious  and  philosophical 
teachers.  We  have  but  to  speak  their  names 
to  state  their  significance.  As  with  all  other 
great  personalities,  their  names  are  their  mean- 
ings. All  three,  in  their  several  ways,  are 
giant  witnesses  to  the  spiritual  solution  of  life. 
Tolstoi  and  Bjornson  have  made  their  testi- 
mony by  tearing  from  Christianity  the  sophis- 

[141] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

tries  of  its  ecclesiasticism,  and  revealing  it  once 
more  in  all  the  astonishing  simplicity  of  its 
original  idealism.  Tolstoi  —  in  this  respect, 
the  master  of  Bjornson  —  has  preached  a  fa- 
naticism of  unworldliness  the  value  of  which 
is  not  in  its  literal  application,  but  in  its  sensa- 
tional reminder  of  those  essential  purities  and 
simplicities  which  at  the  first  gave,  and  will 
always  give,  reality  to  the  Christian  movement. 
Mr.  Meredith's  message  is  less  overtly  re- 
ligious. He  makes  his  appeal  as  a  poet  and 
philosopher,  an  evangelist  for  subtler  minds. 
He  takes  more  account  of  the  world  as  it  is,  in 
all  its  complicated  paradoxes  of  good  and  evil, 
courageously  facing  mountains  of  doubt  that 
do  not  exist  for  simple  seers  like  Tolstoi;  and 
yet,  at  the  end  of  a  pilgrimage  of  faith  made 
arduous  by  every  pitfall  and  stumbling-block 

of  the  skeptical  intellect,  he  comes  to  us  ra- 

[142] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

diantly  worn  with  his  unquenchable  faith  in  the 
upper  glories.  I  am  saying  nothing  of  him, 
or  of  Tolstoi  and  Bjornson,  merely  as  novelists, 
because  all  three  have  used  the  novel  for  finer 
issues  than  even  the  most  classical  entertain- 
ment. In  their  hands  the  novel  is  the  parable 
of  the  modern  world.  Like  all  great  teachers, 
they  also  teach  in  parables.  The  parables  are 
wonderful  literature;  but,  however  brilliant  the 
style  and  technique  of  a  parable,  it  is,  after  all, 
its  message  that  is  universally  important.  The 
novels  of  Tolstoi,  Bjornson  and  Meredith  are 
wonderfully  entertaining,  —  but  it  is  the  atti- 
tude of  the  men  behind  them  that  gives  them 
their  greatest  value. 

I  have  named  these  writers  first  because 
they  appear  to  me  the  greatest  living  person- 
alities employing  the  novel  for  the  highest  lit- 
erary purposes ;  but  there  are  no  few  writers  only 

[143] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

a  step  below  them  whose  work  is  hardly  less 
notable  as  literature   or  less   serious   with   a 
grave  apprehension   of  the  human  situation. 
Indeed,  the  time  is  long  since  gone  by  when 
"novel-reading"  was  that  merely  frivolous  in- 
dulgence in  the  fictitious  upon  which  our  fathers 
looked  askance.     Nowadays,  if  you  have  some- 
thing of  vital  importance  to  communicate  to 
the  world,  you  do  not  put  it  into  a  sermon, 
however    admirable,    or    a    treatise,    however 
learned.     You  put  it  into  a  novel ;  for  the  novel 
has  proved  itself  so  expansive  a  form  that  there 
is  no  material,  human  or  divine,  to  which  it 
cannot  adapt  itself.     It   does   not  necessarily 
displace  all  other  literary  forms,  but  it  certainly 
includes  them.     As  we  continue  our  brief  sur- 
vey of  modern  novelists  and  their  novels,  it 
will  be  seen  how  wide  is  the  territory  of  the 

contemporary  novel. 

[144] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

While  the  modern  novelist  is  an  unquestion- 
able master  of  the  good  story  and  the  living 
character,  he  is  seldom  content  with  being 
that,  and  there  are  few  successful  novelists 
to-day  that  are  not  psychologists,  and  sociolo- 
gists as  well.  Let  us  take  a  few  names  at  ran- 
dom, —  Henry  James,  for  example.  That 
Mr.  James  is  a  master  of  the  social  drama  will 
not  be  denied,  even  by  those  for  whom  the 
microscopical  finesse  of  his  observations  is  so 
fine  as  to  pass  their  patience  and  even  their 
apprehension.  Yet  it  is  hardly  necessary  to 
say  that  his  chief  distinction  is  that,  so  to  say, 
of  a  scientist  of  society.  A  novel  by  him  is  less 
a  novel  than  a  Blue  Book  of  the  upper  classes. 
He  is,  in  this  respect,  the  most  painstaking  of 
the  pupils  of  George  [Meredith,  though  he 
lacks  his  master's  fusing  simplicity  of  imagina- 
tion.    If  he  is  read  in  the  future,  he  will  be 

[145] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  oj  Books 

read  as  one  reads  Darwin  on  earthworms,  — 
for  his  marvelous  observations  of  minute  social 
phenomena. 

Mr.  Howells,  again,  is  an  industrious  social 
observer,  but  his  observation  is  rather  that  of  a 
man  of  the  world  than  that  of  a  social  micro- 
scopist.  He  is  a  broader,  more  creative  writer. 
There  is,  so  to  say,  a  Chaucerian  objectivity 
about  his  observation.  His  business  is  with 
the  average  and  the  normal,  and  he  will  prob- 
ably survive  as  the  first  painter  of  the  American 
middle  class.  His  excellent  style  is  on  the 
side  of  his  endurance,  whereas  the  style  of  Mr. 
James,  like  that  of  his  great  master,  is  plainly 
subject  to  writer's  cramp. 

Even  a  writer  so  robustly  objective  as  Mrs. 

Gertrude  Atherton  would  lose  half  her  value 

if  she  were  not  so  much  of  a  philosopher  and 

poet,  and  acute  social  observer  as  well.  Full 

[140] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

blooded  as  is  the  romance  she  gives  us,  her 
highest  value  is  that  of  a  subtle  and  fearless 
interpreter  of  the  complexities  of  the  modern 
world. 

Mr.  James  Lane  Allen,  again,  is  nothing  if  not 
a  philosopher  and  poet  of  nature.  Perhaps  it 
may  be  thought  that  the  philosopher  grows  on 
him  somewhat  to  the  eclipse  of  the  novelist, 
but  happily  the  later  tendencies  of  a  master 
have  no  influence  on  his  early  masterpieces. 
"The  Reign  of  Law"  throws  no  shadow  over 
"A  Kentucky  Cardinal,"  that  idyl  so  perfect 
in  form,  and  so  exquisite  in  spirit. 

Almost  wherever  we  turn,  we  find  the  novel 

making  its  romance  out  of  reality;  reality  in 

every  meaning  of  that  abused  word,  reality  in 

its  largeness,  reality  in  its  minutiae.     So  much 

has  the  narrow  little  school  of  "  realists  "  helped 

the  great  school   of  reality.     Life  has   other 

[147] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

realities  than  those  seen  by  Zola  and  such 
disciples  of  his  as  George  Moore,  but  his  and 
their  sincerity  in  recording  the  material  facts 
of  life  has  proved  a  much-needed  lesson  for 
those  who  are  more  concerned  to  record  those 
other  facts,  more  significant,  as  it  seems  to 
them,  of  the  human  spirit.  These  porers  upon 
the  dust  have  done  us  the  service  of  making  us, 
so  to  say,  more  truthful  about  the  rainbow. 
They  have  introduced  the  scientific  method 
into  the  seventh  heaven,  and  installed  the 
electric  light  upon  the  shores  of  old  romance; 
and  thus  our  dreams  are  shown  to  be  true, 
though  at  the  same  time  —  dreams.  Our  very 
poets  must  be  "realists"  nowadays. 

The  idea  used  to  be  that  the  novelist  "pre- 
tended," that  he  adapted  life  to  suit  the  tastes 
of  the  sentimental;  that  life  was  really  a  dull 
drab  thing,  and  that  its  excitement  existed  only 

[148] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

in  some  highly  coloured  arrangement  of  the 
inventive  fancy.  But  nowadays  we  take  a  very 
different  view  of  our  novels.  We  have  realized 
that  it  is  life  itself  that  is  romantic,  and  that 
the  truer  our  novels  are  to  the  facts  of  life  the 
more  romantic  they  will  be.  The  old  cant 
phrase  that  "truth  is  stranger  than  fiction," 
may  indeed  be  said  to  have  become  the  canon 
of  the  modern  novel.  We  don't  ask  our  nov- 
elists to  lie  about  life  any  more.  We  ask  them 
to  tell  the  romantic  truth. 

The  number  of  capable  writers  who  are 
telling  the  various  truths  of  life  in  the  form  of 
fiction  is  much  greater  than  contemporary  pes- 
simists realize.  There  is  indeed  no  corner  of 
human  experience  which  cannot  produce  its 
able,  entertaining  representative.  Let  us  take 
some  traditional  forms  of  the  novel,  —  the  sea 

story,   say.     Captain   Marryat  was   indeed  a 

[149] 


Hoiv  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

master,  and  yet  Clarke  Russell  and  Conrad 
and  Jacobs !  In  the  work  of  all  these  men  one 
has  to  acknowledge  that  romantic  fidelity  to 
the  facts  rather  than  the  fancies  of  the  sea 
winch  I  have  spoken  of  as  the  note  of  the 
modern  romantic  realism.  In  the  case  of  Con- 
rad we  have  also  a  writer  of  the  first  literary 
importance,  a  novelist  of  action  and  serious 
vivid  detail,  who  does  not  scorn  to  write  good 
English,  but  who,  more  than  that,  Pole  as  he  is, 
—  and  there  is  an  additional  marvel,  —  writes 
English  of  a  quality  so  English  that,  incredible 
as  it  may  sound,  his  words  are  no  less  exciting 
than  his  adventures.  It  may  almost  be  said 
that  the  fact  of  his  being  a  "foreigner"  using 
our  English  tongue  has  possessed  him  with  a 
regard  for  classical  English  which  alas!  we 
miss  in  such  vociferous  English  writers  as, 
say,  Mr.  Kipling,  —  Mr.  Kipling,  who  is 
patriotic  in  everything  but  his  language. 

[150] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

Mr.  Kipling  perhaps,  of  all  men,  exemplifies 
the  tremendous  practical  importance  of  the 
work  that  can  be  done  by  the  modern  story- 
teller. Regarded  merely  as  a  story-teller,  Mr. 
Kipling  is  not  more  remarkable  than  the  men 
from  whom  he  learned  his  tricks,  the  idealistic 
reporters  of  our  American  papers.  His  method 
is  the  old-time  method  of  the  American  smoke- 
room.  He  seizes  on  the  obtruding  details,  and 
he  nails  them  in  the  cosmopolitan  slang  of  the 
moment.  That  is  why  we  enjoy  him  so  much, 
and  why  even  our  boys  of  fifteen  are  already 
beginning  to  wonder  what  he  means.  He 
chose  to  employ  the  means  of  the  moment, 
for  the  expression  of  the  ideals  of  the  moment, 
—  the  Hans  Christian  Andersen  of  imperialism. 
But  his  clever  little  stories,  which  even  we,  who 
read  them  so  eagerly  as  they  appeared,  yawn 

over  to-day,  meant  nothing  less  than  the  New 

[151] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Notion  of  Greater  England.     They  were  much 

more  than  stories.     They  were  the  Colonial 

Sentiment,    the    Boer    War,    the    Preferential 

Tariff.     Mr.  Kipling's  significance  is  that  of  a 

political   pamphlet.     In  the  future  his   name 

will  be  known  as  the  brilliant  pamphleteer  of 

Mr.  Chamberlain,  and  it  will  be  his  politics 

that  will  keep  his  poetry  alive. 

Sir  Gilbert  Parker,  again,  is  a   novelist  who 

illustrates  the  effectiveness  of  the  novel  as  a 

political  medium.     Mr.  Parker  writes  too  well 

not  to  realize  that  he  does  not  write  well  enough, 

and  he  is  too  much  occupied  with  his  social 

ambitions  to  concern  himself  with  his  literary 

failure.     He  is  by  no  means  despicable  as  a 

Canadian  poster,  —  though,  as  a  real  exponent 

of  Canada,  he  does  not  begin  to  compare  with 

Charles  G.  D.  Roberts.     Few  books  of  animal 

study  so   truly  picture  wild   life   as  does  Mr. 

[152] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

Roberts's  "The  Heart  of  the  Ancient  Wood." 
No  real  writer  is  made  a  knight,  though  he 
may  consent  to  become  a  lord. 

Yet,  in  saying  this  one  naturally  thinks  of 
Sir  Conan  Doyle,  and  remembers  "  Micah 
Clarke."  Obviously  "Micah  Clarke"  came 
out  of  the  loins  of  "  Lorna  Doone,"  and  Sir 
Conan  would,  I  am  sure,  be  proud  of  its  deri- 
vation, for  to  be  so  sturdy  a  disciple  of  such  a 
master  is  a  wonderful  beginning.  Of  all  the 
recent  products  of  "historical"  novelists, 
"  Micah  Clarke  "  stands  the  one  chance  of  sur- 
vival, by  reason  of  its  strong  construction,  its 
strenuous  and  sweet  spirit,  and  its  quiet,  force- 
ful English.  The  public  knows  Sir  Conan  for 
lesser  things, — for  "Sherlock  Holmes"  (for 
which,  with  a  modesty  that  is  as  characteristic 
as  it  is  becoming,  he  has  disclaimed  the  origi- 
nality in  favor  of  such  masters  as  Poe  and 

[153] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

Wilkie  Collins)  and  "Brigadier  Gerard,"  but, 
without  denying  the  literary  resource  of  "  Sher- 
lock Holmes,"  it  is  "Micah  Clarke"  and  "The 
White  Company"  that  matter,  and  matter 
quite  a  good  deal,  to  readers  of  modern  fiction. 
Sir  Conan  Doyle  may  be  truthfully  said  to  be 
one  of  the  public  favourites  that  vindicate  the 
public  taste. 

Talking  of  great  novelists,  what  shall  we 
say  for  such  public  favourites  as  Miss  Marie 
Corelli  and  Mr.  Hall  Caine  ?  Personally,  I  think 
that  there  is  little  to  be  said  for  Miss  Corelli, 
except  that  she,  obviously,  supplies  the  gigantic 
demand  in  the  human  heart  for  sentimental 
melodrama,  bogus  mystery  and  cheap,  semi- 
religious  poetry.  She  is  as  inevitable  as  bad 
furniture  and  sentimental  autotypes. 

Mr.  Hall  Caine,  to  do  him  justice,  is  rather 

different.     There  was  a  time  —  when  he  wrote 

[154] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

"  The  Deemster  "  —  when  he  wrote  with  some- 
thing of  an  original  inspiration.  He  had  felt 
the  Celtic  poetry  of  the  Isle  of  Man,  and  he 
had  been  able  to  express  it  in  terms  of  vivid 
drama.  "The  Deemster"  remains  Mr.  Caine's 
justification  for  his  subsequent  parodies  and 
violations  of  a  real  gift.  "The  Bondman" 
was  a  striking  book,  in  the  Victor  Hugo,  and 
very  much  the  Robert  Buchanan,  manner;  but, 
with  the  coming  of  his  financial  success,  the 
tares  have  sprung  up  and  choked  Mr.  Caine's 
artistic  wheat,  and  such  books  as  "The  Chris- 
tian" and  "The  Eternal  City,"  beyond  selling 
well,  have  done  nothing  but  show  how  Mr. 
Caine  has  imitated  Zola's  later  moralistic  man- 
ner. 

Fortunately,  Zola's  simplicity  has  made  bet- 
ter disciples  in  England;  George  Moore,  for 
example,  and  George  Gissing.     Both  writers 

[155] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

suffer  from  the  dulness  of  their  subject-matter, 
yet  "Esther  Waters"  is  something  more  than 
a  document,  and  "The  New  Grub  Street"  and 
"The  Whirlpool"  are  engaging  blue  books  of 
the  middle  class.  Still,  both  writers  illustrate 
the  Englishman's  way  of  taking  his  pleasures 
sadly.  Even  his  novels  must  smack  of  the 
Sunday-school.  "Robert  Elsemere,"  for  ex- 
ample, gained  a  success  which  placed  Mrs. 
Humphrey  Ward  in  the  front  rank  of  English 
theologians.  She  has  since  written  books  to 
prove  that  she  was  a  novelist  all  the  time.  I 
suppose  that  she  must  be  acknowledged  as  the 
creator  of  the  popular  religious  novel,  —  and, 
in  passing,  one  may  note  with  what  activity  and 
with  what  success  the  modern  woman  writer 
has  made  use  of  the  novel.  Sometimes  she  has 
won  a  passing  notoriety  with  the  naively  out- 
spoken exposition  of  delicate  social  questions, 

[156] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

with  which  she  is  hardly  competent  to  deal. 
"Sarah  Grand"  is  such  a  writer,  and  another 
writer  of  much  greater  power  is  "  George  Eger- 
ton."  But  America  in  particular  can  count 
on  three  young  women  writers  of  something 
like  classical  significance.  I  have  already 
spoken  of  Mrs.  Gertrude  Atherton.  Mrs.  Mary 
E.  Wilkins  Freeman  has  long  been  recognized 
as  the  Jane  Austen  of  New  England;  and  Mrs. 
Edith  Wharton  possesses  just  that  combination 
of  social  philosopher,  poet-wit,  and  novelist 
which  tempts  one  to  call  her  the  American 
"John  Oliver  Hobbes,"  —  not  to  forget  Mrs. 
Craigie  in  speaking  of  writers  that  are  also 
women,  —  though,  actually,  Mrs.  Wharton  is 
a  much  more  important  writer.  It  must  be 
noted,  in  speaking  of  English  women  writers, 
that  the  most  offensively  sexual  novel  of  our 
days  —  "  Sir  Richard  Calmady  "  —  is  the  work 

[157] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

of  a  woman;  for  the  name  of  "Lucas  Malet" 
cannot  be  omitted  from  the  list  of  women 
writers  of  the  moment.  Of  course,  one  doesn't 
forget  that  "  Lucas  Malet "  has  written  "  Mrs. 
Lorimer,""  Colonel  Enderby's  Wife,"  and  "A 
Counsel  of  Perfection"  as  well. 

One  of  the  notorious  literary  features  of  the 
time  has  been  the  "  historical,"  or,  should  we 
not  rather  say,  the  costume  novel.  Stevenson, 
of  course,  set  the  fashion  when,  as  Mr.  H.  B. 
Marriott  Watson  —  one  of  his  most  faithful  dis- 
ciples—  has  been  saying  in  the  Fortnightly 
Review,  he  turned  back  the  tide  of  French 
realism  with  that  wonderful  toy-book  "  Treas- 
ure Island."  The  way  in  antiquam  silvam 
pointed  out  by  Stevenson,  has  been  followed 
by  a  few  writers  naturally  fitted  to  tread  it,  — 
though  it  must  be  said  that  the  select  little  army 

of  romance  has  been  followed  by  a  most  dis- 

[158] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

tressing  cloud  of  dull  and  noisy  camp-followers. 
Even  the  real  army  has  been  rather  disappoint- 
ing, when  one  considers  the  opportunity  pro- 
vided by  Stevenson's  brilliant,  and  really  au- 
thentic, raising  from  the  dead  of  the  great  Sir 
Walter.  There  are  names  one  mentions  with 
gratitude  and  even  respect,  —  such  as  Stanley 
Weyman  (who  must,  perhaps,  be  credited  with 
personally  hailing  back  to  Dumas),  A.  E.  W. 
Mason,  Egerton  Castle,  Booth  Tarkington,  — 
and  yet  not  even  the  best  of  these  literary  ma- 
nipulators of  the  plumed  hat  and  the  rapier 
have  given  us  anything  of  which  we  can  even 
remember  the  name,  —  without  a  self-con- 
scious effort  of  gratitude.  With  the  possible 
exception  of  "A  Gentleman  of  France,"  this 
noisy  "historical"  fiction  has  left  us  nothing 
but  a  garish  mountain  of  stage-properties,  and 
a  theatrical  wardrobe  already  cloudy  with  the 

[159] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

moth.  It  has  not  even  produced  a  book  com- 
parable with  "John  Inglesant,"  not  to  mention 
such  a  book  as  "The  Cloister  and  the  Hearth." 
This  is  really  strange  —  for  such  an  eager  op- 
portunity seldom  passes  with  a  response  so 
breakneck  and  so  moblike  and  yet  so  pitifully 
inadequate.  Of  course,  such  an  historical  nov- 
elist as  Henryk  Sienkiewicz  belongs  to  an  older 
greater  period;  though  we  must  not  forget  to 
add  the  author  of  "Quo  Vadis"  and  "With 
Fire  and  Sword"  to  that  small  company  of  the 
great  to  which  I  referred  at  the  beginning  of 
this  article. 

There  are  several  other  names  of  world-wide 
significance  which,  falling  into  no  particular 
category,  may  as  well  be  mentioned  here: 
Pierre  Loti,  with  his  romantic  egotism;  Paul 
Bourget,  with  his  psychological  egotism;  and 

Gabriel  D'Annunzio,  with  his  biological  ego- 

[160] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

tism.  To  M.  Loti's  iridescent  French  we 
owe  one  of  our  earliest  and  most  alluring  vis- 
ions of  the  East;  and  through  M.  Bourget's 
limpid  prose  we  have  seen  many  a  delicate 
secret  of  the  heart  of  love.  But  Gabriel  D'- 
Annunzio  is  a  stronger  figure,  a  hot  tumultuous 
nature,  a  very  jungle  of  passion  and  inspiration. 
His  books,  indeed,  are  tropical  in  their  coarse 
elemental  power,  offensive  in  their  riotous  vi- 
tality; their  pages  are  heavy  with  Roman  fever 
—  and  yet,  what  marvellous  flowers  spring  out 
of  this  polluted  marsh,  what  sanctifying  skies 
stretch  across  it,  and  with  what  song  of  almost 
unearthly  purity  this  beautiful  morass  can  greet 
the  dawn.  After  all,  great  writers  must  be 
taken  as  they  are.  They  are  not  good  for 
everybody,  but  perhaps  nothing  else  is;  and 
D'Annunzio  is  so  great  a  poet  that  the  evil  in 
him  of  which  we  have  heard  perhaps  too  much 

[161] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

is,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  burned  up  in  the 
strong  flame  of  his  ascending  spirit. 

Another  great,  unclassifiable  novelist  for  us 
who  think  in  English  is  Thomas  Hardy,  whose 
earlier,  less  conscious,  books  —  such  early 
idyllic  things  as  "Under  the  Greenwood  Tree," 
and  such  poetically  conceived  tragedies  as 
"  The  Return  of  the  Native  "  —  will  probably, 
as  Herrick  wrote,  remain  his  "pillar"  when 
"  Jude  the  Obscure  "  is  forgotten.  Mr.  Hardy, 
so  to  say,  has  been  famous  several  times,  in 
much  the  same  way  as  Mr.  Meredith.  Long 
ago  he  was  famous  from  "  Far  from  the  Mad- 
ding  Crowd."  Then  his  fame  went  to  sleep, 
till  he  was  rediscovered  by  a  new  generation 
with  "Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles."  Over  that 
almost  Shakespearianly  Arcadian  novel  one  felt 
already  that  approaching  shadow  of  grim  Zo- 
laistic  morality  which  covered  "Jude"  with  so 

[162] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

thick  a  pall.  Perhaps  it  was  a  pity  that  what 
was,  after  all,  a  passing  pessimism  should  so 
"fright  away  the  dryads  and  the  fauns"  from 
Mr.  Hardy's  orchards  and  fragrant  hayfields, 
and  substitute  a  determined  Greek  tragedy  for 
those  warm  droppings  of  human  tears  which  in 
"The  Woodlanders"  we  had  heard  fall  on  the 
grave  of  Marty  South.  Still,  every  artist  must 
take  his  own  course,  and  Mr.  Hardy  has  suffi- 
cient purely  "  artistic  "  achievement  behind  him 
to  allow  him  to  take  divagations  into  advanced 
morality.  It  will  be  strange  if  England  should 
ever  forget  to  read  one  of  thesincerest  of  English 
writers.  Surely  Thomas  Hardy  will  return 
with  the  cowslips  so  long  as  the  plow  turns  up 
arrowheads  on  Salisbury  Plain. 

Speaking  of  the  English  Hardy,  one  is  re- 
minded of  Arthur  Sherburne  Hardy,  whose 
"But  Yet  a  Woman"  is  surely  one  of  the  quiet 

[163] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

American  classics,  and  whose  "Passee  Rose" 
is  worth  all  the  recent  "historical"  imitations 
rolled  together.  Speaking  too  of  what  one 
might  call  isolated  classics,  one  is  surely  not 
sorry  that  Henry  Blake  Fuller's  strenuous  work 
on  the  Chicago  novel  has  not  made  us  forget 
"The  Chevalier  of  Pensieri-Vani."  But  I 
would  not  be  thought  to  speak  of  the  Chicago 
novel  with  anything  but  respect.  If  only 
Frank  Norris  had  lived!  Yet  the  school  of 
which  he  was  the  most  conspicuous  pen  counts 
other  men  worth  watching  —  men  such  as 
Robert  Herrick  and  Churchill  Williams;  men 
who  have  seen  and  ably  expressed  the  romance 
of  American  realism  and  American  history. 
Mr.  Chatfield-Taylor,of  course,  is  a  Chicagoan, 
too;  but  he  is  too  much  of  a  cosmopolitan  wit 
and  "  fantast "  to  be  counted  merely  as  a  proph- 
et of  his  own  country.     Of  course,  Winston 

[1G4] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

Churchill  must  not  be  forgotten  as  a  conscien- 
tious exponent  of  American  history;  while  Mr. 
Townsend  has  achieved  the  very  rare  distinc- 
tion of  fixing  a  national  type  in  "  Chimmie 
Fadden."  Richard  Harding  Davis  almost 
achieved  a  like  success  in  his  early  "  Van  Bib- 
ber" stories.  He  has  since  written  a  delicious 
idyl  in  "The  Princess  Aline";  and,  say  what 
you  will,  he  is  a  very  brilliant  journalist,  and 
has  a  most  attractive  personality. 

Perhaps  of  all  the  books  inspired  by  what  I 
might  call  the  American  historico-topographi- 
cal  movement,  none  (after  "David  Harum") 
comes  so  near  to  being  the  real  thing  as  Owen 
Wister's  "The  Virginian."  That,  again,  was 
one  of  the  very  few  books  popular  with  the 
public  that  justifies  the  public  taste. 

I  find,  in  looking  around  the  field  of  the  con- 
temporary novel,  that  quite  a  few  of  really  sig- 

[165] 


How  to  get  the  Best  Out  of  Books 

nificant  names  remain  outside  my  classification. 
There  are  such  born  story-tellers  as  Marion 
Crawford  and  Seton  Merriman;  there  is  Henry 
Harland,  who  writes  so  prettily  of  that  old 
Bohemia  of  the  Latin  Quarter  that  is  gone; 
there  is  Anthony  Hope,  sprung  so  daintily  from 
the  loins  of  " Harry  Richmond";  there  is  Mau- 
rice Hewlett,  who  is  so  true  a  poet  and  so  in- 
tense a  realist  of  old  romance,  that  one  begs 
him,  on  the  bended  knees  of  a  devoted  reader, 
to  abandon  the  Meredithian  medievalism  of 
his  style;  and  there  is  Robert  Hichens,  who,  in 
his  loving  observation  of   London  life,  unites 
something  of  the  voluminous  subtlety  of  his 
beloved  Balzac,  with  the  kindly  Cockney  por- 
traiture  of   Dickens   and   Phil    May.     Then, 
again,  there  is  H.  G.  Wells,  who  is  so  excellent 
a  rejuvenation  of  his  great  master,  Jules  Verne; 
and  yet,  judging  by  some  of  his  merely  sub- 
lunary stories,  is  envious  of  the  laurels  of  Mr. 

[166] 


The  Novel  and  Novelists  of  To-day 

Gissing.  Think  of  a  man  who  knows  all  there 
is  to  tell  about  Mars,  —  the  man  who  wrote 
"The  Time-Machine,"  —  preferring  to  dissect 
the  soul  of  a  grocer's  assistant!  Yet  in  "The 
Wheels  of  Chance,"  and  "Love  and  Mr. 
Lawisham,"  Mr.  Wells  may  be  said  to  have 
achieved  a  genuine  Clapham  success.  Still, 
dare  one  say  to  Mr.  Wells  that  so  many  writers 
can  teach  us  such  ethics  of  the  dust,  and  so  few 
give  us  that  lift  above  the  dust  which  we  gain 
from  the  more  characteristic  imaginations  of 
his  spontaneous  science. 

This  review  of  modern  novelists  has  neces- 
sarily been  very  cursory;  yet,  whatever  names 
may  involuntarily  have  been  forgotten,  I  think 
it  is  full  enough  to  illustrate  the  remarkable 
scope  and  general  excellence  of  the  modern 
novel.  One  can  seriously  say  that  the  world, 
that  has  always  stood  in  need  of  story-tellers, 
has  never  been  better  supplied. 

[167] 


CONFESSIO   A  MANTIS 

By  the  Author. 


WHEN  do  I  love  you  most,  sweet  books 
of  mine  ? 
In  strenuous  morns  when  der  your  leaves  I  pore, 
Austerely  bent  to  win  austerest  lore, 
Forgetting  how  the  dewy  meadows  shine  ; 
Or  afternoons  when  honeysuckles  twine 
About  the  seat,  and  to  some  dreamy  shore 
Of  old  romance,  where  lovers  evermore 
Keep  blissful  hours,  I  follow  at  your  sign  ? 

Yea!  ye  are  precious  then,  but  most  to  me 
Ere  lamplight  dawneth,  when  low  croons  the 

fire 
To  whispering  twilight  in  my  little  room; 
And  eyes  read  not,  but,  sitting  silently, 
I  feel  your  great  hearts  throbbing  deep  inquire, 
And  hear  your  breathing  round  me  in  the  gloom. 


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"AUG  241960. 

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Form  L9-25m-8,'46(9852)444 


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